of philological study. The thief's life is no less often jolly and rollicking than is that of the beggar, and most thieves can beg and most beggars steal. In England and in Italy schools for instruction in thievery have been devised, and the excite- ment and uncertainty of life and the fresh possibilities of each day, which may end in a feast and debauch or in prison, have a certain great and natural charm. It was precisely in those days when the severest penalties were meted out to thieves, that it was necessary to chain cups, knives, forks, books, etc., and even now theft is less severely condemned by the moral sense of the community than most other crimes.
The thief has been described by the Lombroso schools as marked by certain physical and psychic qualities almost as if thieves constituted a special species of mankind. Those who have sought to trace the embryology of crime have found it among animals. MacDonald ^ holds that simple theft is marked by certain anthropometric proportions. While this may be the case in older countries, where this crime has become * Minder jahrige Verbrecher. Berlin, 1896, p. 367, • Le Criminal type. Paris, 1894, p. 39 et seq.
366 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE more of a profession, one can not visit American prisoners or in- spect the faces of Byrnes's ^ collection without the conviction that in this country criminals against property are often men of fine and even distinguished form, feature, and appearance, whom it is doubtful if all the measurements of the Bertillon sys- tem of identification could distinguish from the honest classes of the business community. No class of crimes is more relative than those against property. When the old English law was striving to exclude all middle men, regrating, which was simply buying up the market and waiting for a rise in price, was severely punished and forestalling was a penal offense, as were many other practises now common. Many letters of marque and reprisal were only licensed piracy. A serf or villein who went where he was not told was held to have stolen himself. ^ The incendiaries, especially of the pyromaniac type, are com- monly adolescents. This passion begins in the strong instinct to gaze into the fire; in the pleasure in seeing it grow, its tongues fork out and reduce combustibles to smoke and cinders. With the adult, this often has a soporific and almost hypnotic power and stimulation to fancy. A bonfire suggests jubilation and feasting, and is glorious at night, bidding defiance to dark- ness. Perhaps all men have the germs of fire-worshipers in them, and of all chemical processes this is the most fascinating. Some have thought it an epoch in an infant's life when it de- velops a passion for striking matches or throwing things into the fire to see them burn. This is the germ from which pure pyromania, if there is such a thing, springs, of which the in- stinct of the boy to run to fires is only the normally repressed form. Despine ^ thinks the monomania of burning for its own sake is a neuropathic inheritance which usually emerges at this age, and he distinguishes it from incendiaries for vengeance, avarice, jealousy, etc. Often, when the fire is kindled, the youthful incendiary runs for help, strives to put it out, and really pities those who suffer, not at all to disguise his crime, but because his human sympathies are aroused. This is very > Professional Criminals of America. N. Y., 1886.
* L. O, Pike: History of Crime in England.
• Psychologie Naturelle. Vol. iii, p. 133.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 3^7 different from the cases where hallucinatory voices command to burn and in early youth may even be innocent.
Another juvenile motive for setting fires is the love of the excitement caused, the rattle of the engines and the spout- ing of the water, the rescue of property and perhaps persons, the breathless crowds, the danger and novelty of which makes the nerves tingle. Youth thus often magnifies its own causative efficiency. It can not construct, but can destroy, and thus puts itself in the place of fate for helpless victims. This motive shades into the former and others, and strikes perhaps a root back into the psychic soil, where traces of ancient experiences of plunder, devastation, nightly foray, still exist. At any rate, this is radically different from the secret habits of revenge and hate, although even these may prompt incendiarism in youth.
The psychology of alcohol has become a new and interesting theme which must be more fully explored and carefully studied before we know the ethics of temperance. The intoxication habit is polygenetic. Religious intoxication cults abound both among civilized and savage races, on the theory that what- ever makes the nerves crepitate brings the soul into communion with the gods, stimulates visions, expels diseases and bad spirits. Partridge,^ who has best summed up this theme, shows how common the use of intoxicants has been in puberal rites among the American Indian tribes. All festivities, even death, are celebrated by intoxicants to produce artificial excitement. Primitive drinking was periodic or in modern terms dipso- maniacal, and not the steady drinking of the drunkard. Al- most no tribe is known that has not had some stimulant or nar- cotic. Spencer holds that temperance first arose by offering a part of the drink to the gods. Samuelson holds that in every nation just before the time of its highest culture intoxica- tion was prevalent, and in Greece the Dionysian orgies and the ecstatic dithyrambs of wine-flushed revelers preceded the golden age of the Greek intellect. All stimulants and nar- cotics in small doses or in their initial effects stimulate and later in large doses tend to narcosis, although whether intoxi- cation is the paralysis of higher controlling cells or the direct * Studies in the Psychology of Alcohol. Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1900, vol.
368 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE stimulus of lower ones is not known. The pleasure of intoxi- cation is the widened range and increased intensity of emotional life; the sense of larger vitality; exhilaration, carelessness, confidence, and wider social feelings. Inebriety is more com- mon in spring and early summer, and least in the fall and winter, and many interesting weekly and monthly curves have been traced. In general. Partridge concludes, " that drinking does not begin during school life, but in the great majority of cases the first drink is taken after the boy has left school and begun to associate with older men. The beginning was almost always social." Many habitual drinkers would feel disgraced to drink otherwise than socially. Our language has scores of words and phrases ^ designating inebriate states, which sug- gests how interesting they have always been, most of them, however, being terms of contempt or signifying exaltation — such as artificial, bended, breezy, canonized, cozy, electrified, fresh, glided, glorious, heady, irrigated, inspired, loaded, mel- low, ossified, plowed, queered, salted, shot, touched, etc. In- toxication has been much besung for its abandon and pleasure, from the days of Anacreon to the quatrains of Khayyam and modern student and other bibulous songs.
At no time of life is the love of excitement so strong as during the season of the accelerated development of adoles- cence, which craves strong feelings and new sensations, when monotony, routine, and detail are intolerable, and when the breakings out both of students and prisoners in cells are most common.^ Prison literature shows that the sudden spells of rage, above spoken of, when convicts feel that they must shriek, smash everything, tear their clothes, butt their heads against the wall until they are exhausted, are most common in the later teens and early twenties, at the age when in normal youth the craving for strong and new sensations is most in- stinctive. Among primitive people and especially males, life generally has a rhythm of days or even weeks, in which a spell of unusual energy and activity is succeeded by one of apathy. Indeed the impulse for intense states of mind has perhaps been useful in man's excelsior push upward to ever higher forms of ' Nowhere better described than in the remarkably graphic and detailed biog- raphy of Jane Cameron, a typical female convict described by F. W. Robinson.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 3^9 psychic life, and also has been in rapport with sexual impulse and tension. The passion for strong sensations then at ado- lescence favors greater capacity and aids mental development, and intoxication is a psycho-kinetic equivalent and aberrant ex- pression of man's upward impulsion. Some writers have even thought that stimulants have been on the whole useful in making wider variations of life, preserving self-feeling, and keeping off pain. There is really no opposition between the view that craving for stimulants is an expression of neuras- thenia, and the view of Beard ^ that the most energetic liberty- loving and religious people with the greatest passion for inde- pendence and procreation are also those most given to intoxi- cation, so that intemperance is a by-product of mental evolu- tion.
" Brain-workers," says an experienced friend of prisoners,^ " provide the most hopeless cases of dipsomania. Increased brain power, more brain work, more brain exhaustijon, more nervous desire for a stimulant, more rapid succumbing to the alcohol habit, these are the stages that can be noted every- where among those who have had more ' schooling ' than their fathers. Australia consumes more alcohol per head than any other nation. In Australia primary education is more uni- versal than in England, and yet there criminals have increased out of all proportion to the population."
Rylands ^ accounts for the passion of drink in those who hate the taste of liquor and yet take it to excess by " a condi- tion of pathological unrest or a diseased and overpowering mental and physical uneasiness, which it is impossible to de- scribe, but which demands relief even at the price of adding to the trouble."
Mr. Partridge found that in 65 cases the age at which the first drink was taken was in all but four cases before twenty- two, and sixteen led all other ages. In the curve on the next page, based on 498 cases of inebriety, 443 males and 55 fe- males, he shows the time when the drinking habit was formed.
Most habits are formed between fifteen and twenty-five, and the drinkers career usually closes in about twenty-five years, ^ Stimulants and Narcotics.
' Prisons and Prisoners, by J. W. Horsley. London, 1898, p. 50. •Crime: Its Causes and Remedy, by L. G. Rylands. London, 1889, p. 9a. 25 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE either by the exhaustion of the desire or by death. It coincides nearly with the vigor of sexual life, etc., and very few cure^ take place under twenty-five.
The psychology of prostitution has constantly attracted more and more attention since the epoch-making work of Parent-Duchatelet.^ Ferriani ^ undertakes a rough analysis of the causes in 10,422 cases, which are as follows, in order of prevalence: General vice and depravity, 2,752; loss of hus- band and parents or other sup- porter of a family and from other causes of misery, 2,139; seduction by lovers, 1,653; ^y ' patrons, employers, and others upon whom they were dependent, 927; desertion by husbands, par- ents, etc., 794; luxury, 698; in- citement of those loved or others, not members of the family, 666; by parents, husbands, or other members of their family, 400; to support children, parents, or poor or sick members of their family, 393. Despine ^ first and later Ferriani best undertook to analyze the sense of shame or instinctive modesty, and both regard its loss as one of the chief causal factors. Everything, like family life in one room, fami- liarity with obscene or risque phrases, stories, pictures, etc., tends to break it down and thus precludes its emphatic normal accentuation at puberty, so that an effective barrier against vice is lost. Self-respect is another and more complex preventive agent, and whatever diminishes a proper amour propre and a sense of personal dignity predis- * De la Prostitution dans la ville de Paris. Bruxelles, 1832. ' Minderjahrige Verbrecher. Berlin, 1896, p. 169.
Number of Oases Age 10 / \ \ \ x ^ 5 \ \ y / ( \ / > / / ^J / \ y [ I \ JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 37^^ poses to the fall of virtue. Lack of the power of foresight or of making what is really known of bad consequences effective in preventing them; shallow, excessive, and easily inflammable vanity; idleness and distaste for effort and labor; unattractive homes; excessive or premature development of sense, with objective knowledge and images of its modes of gratification — all these preform the soul; while an easy conscience that makes lying facile; a love of gormandizing and gratification of the appetite; turbulent and mobile dispositions that upset poise and regularity; the normal rhythms of day, week, and month; slovenly and untidy habits of dress and regimen, and bad body keeping generally; a sentimental disposition which passes over by ready and easy stages into the passional state, when control is temporarily lost and with it responsibility; a dis- position to emotional prodigality and intensity (which favors the amorous obscession which can focus love upon a person whose unworthiness is a measure of its intensity) — this is the psychic foundation and background upon which the colossal and, according to all statistics, now increasing and ever more youthful evil of prostitution is built. Many recent writers insist that the victim of the seducer need not be immoral and is often pure and innocent, and that the entire responsibility rests with him and with society, which is excessively, if not hypo- critically, cruel to the least lapse in girls, and will take no ac- count of mitigating circumstances. The results of this social condition for young girls are well described by Augagneur,^ Ferriani,^ Lombroso,^ Berry,* Taxil,^ and Ascher,® and many others.
Sighele thinks that in many communities there are certain families from which corrupting influences irradiate among the young, which directly tend to this vice. Some hold that most girls, who do not come from good hereditary stock or good homes, have a period of intense and precocious passion which exposes them to peculiar dangers during the earliest teens, be- * La Prostitution des Filles Mineures. ' Entartete Mutter. La Infanticida, ' La Donna Delinquente.
* Les Petits Martyres.
^ La Corruption, Fin-de-Si^cle, * Grundsatze der vorbeugenden und der correctionellen Erziehung. Wien und Leipzig, 1880.
37^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE cause unprotected by knowledge which comes later, although pleasure in vice soon fades and changes to disgust. Others minimize the passional element or emphasize " psychic lazi- ness," ascribe the chief causes to vanity, the reading of ro- mance, or lay stress upon other factors. Much as we have lately learned, there is still no department of vice so little understood. This theme has a singular fascination to many minds, and for the most diverse reasons. To many it seems paradoxical that these girls should cling with such passionate devotion to faith- less lovers and endure their blows and abuses. Their extreme pity and sympathy for each other, and sometimes for children, animals, and even relatives, stands out in glaring contrast with the general moral callousness which not only public sentiment, but the new criminology assigns them. Although adepts in hypocrisy, and most of them clever in simulating a modesty and shame which they know nothing of, they have not only an honor, but an honesty and frankness to their friends which is sometimes extreme and admirable. Some of them are very re- ligious in both the formal and emotional meaning of that term, and not a few cherish the tenderest sentiments toward their abandoned home, parents, and the memories of their youth.
Their psychology, too, affords the evolutionist profound matter for reflection in its suggestiveness of conditions of ancient polyandrous forms of society as well as being symptomatic of almost every imperfection in modern social conditions. Its problems will never be understood from the study of woman's nature alone, nor from that of the present status.
In Paris, where statistics are best, the minimum age of in- scription in the police registers for prostitutes is sixteen years. Richard's ^ tables give the number for each age up to twenty years of age, which is the age of majority. Venereal disease is at no age so active. When the number actually registered is considered in connection with the reluctance of judges to con- vict on first offense, and with the fact that the vice does not nat- urally become habitual at first, and that if it does it is not usually known to the police for some time, it must be inferred, as Roussel has urged, that the moral abandonment of young girls in large cities is far greater than any data show, and also probably considerably earlier.
* La Prostitution k Paris. Paris, 1890, p. 192 et seq.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 373 In his valuable study of rapes, Tardieu ^ shows that these crimes are increasingly upon young girls, and that particularly in the cities the age of victims is diminishing; that they are much more common in May, June, and July than in any other quarter, and least so in November, December, and January. The age of 632 victims was distributed as follows: Under thirteen years of age, 435; from thirteen to fifteen, 90; from fifteen to twenty, 84; above twenty, 9; age not given, 14. The age of consent by the law of 1863 was placed at thirteen years. Corre presents a very instructive curve, showing that violations of young girls have increased almost steadily since 1830, and in a ratio which outstrips that of any other crime.^ Lord Hale defines rape to be " the carnal knowledge of any woman above the age of ten years against her will, and of a woman child under the age of ten with or against her will." This is common law of England, and hence has arisen the term " age of consent." In general, force has always been assumed by courts prior to this age, whereas after it the question of con- sent or force is a matter for the decision of the jury. Thus the higher this age is placed and therefore the longer the severer punishment is in force, the greater the protection for girls. H. L. Bullock, the director of this movement, writes me January 9, 1 90 1, " when we began this phase of our work about twenty years ago, the age of consent was not above ten years in any State." But when the facts were known and a distinct move- ment made, legislators have raised this age little by little, rarely over two years at a time, twenty-one years being the age the Purity Leagues seek, despite the legal entanglements that some- times follow from marriage contracts made under eighteen. Long ago Dr. Roberts ^ had urged that the mind of young girls are so unstable and their consciences so elastic that our laws fixing the " age of consent " needed change. Although the average age of first menstruation is perhaps not far from fourteen, there is an individual variation of five or six years, and this and the younger limit of the marriage age have to be considered. This is especially true when we reflect that every- thing indicates that the majority of the 230,000 women in this * Etude Mddico-L^gale sur les Attentats aux Moeurs. Paris, 1878, p. 22.
• Grime et Suicide. Paris, 1891, p. 362. •Physical Maturity of Women. Lancet, July, 1885.
374 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADLOESCENCE country, who are known to professionally invite lust and the large additional number that yield to it, begin their downward career before the above age, which it is sought to fix. All these considerations too, of course, enforce the great desirability of protecting immaturity from all libidinous and lewd sugges- tion, and our consciences may well be stirred when Mr. Corn- stock assures us that nearly fifty American papers are excluded from Canada as indecent.
The following table of the age of consent is revised to 1900: None.
Ind. Ter. (for Indians), Ky., Nev., Va., W. Va.
None, Ariz., Conn., Ga., Ill,, Ind,, N. Mex., Vt., Wis.
Iowa (raised from 13), Neb, Ala. (raised from 10), Ark., Cal, (raised from 14), Del. (raised from 7 with death penalty now lightened), D, C, Ind. T. (for whites), La., Me, (raised from 14), Mass., Minn,, Mont., N. H, (raised from 13), N. D. (raised from 14), Ohio, Ore., Pa., R, I,, S, D., Tenn., Tex. (raised from 15).
None.
None.
Col,, Fla (raised from 17 for seduction), Idaho, Md, (raised from 14), Mich,, N, J. (raised from 16), N. ¥., Utah (raised from 13), Wash, (raised from 12), Wyo.
None.
None.
Mo.
The statistics of suicide constitute one of the chief themes of social dynamics. No crime is more completely dependent upon food, business, season, time of day, climate, age, sex, etc. These statistics are among the most sensitive of many indexes of social well or ill being. The ancients, especially the Stoics, assumed that any one had a right to make away with himself if he did not choose to live. It is only in modern times that sui- cide has generally been considered as a crime. The motives of suicide, although generally difficult to ascertain, constitute one of the most interesting of all psychological problems. It seems paradoxical that by an act of free-will, one should be able to negate the will to live, and some philosophers have thought it the most courageous of acts to overcome the repugnance to suicide by a sense of duty and have refused to be convinced that this act could with any justice be called self-murder. When, however, present life seems mean and painful and a glorious life beyond the tomb completely assured, it is easy for the soul 10 II years.
12 ti 13 16 << (< 17 18 19 20 21 (1 JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 375 " to fling the dust aside, and naked on the air of heaven ride." Hume and Schopenhauer justified it even as an experiment or a question put to nature, although a clumsy one, because " it abolishes the identity of the consciousness which should receive an answer."
There is a kind of reciprocity between life and death. In ages and races that have been eminent and successful, present existence has seemed delightful, and when, e. g., Rome fell and the hope of the race went out, suicide became an epidemic. For one falsely accused of a vile act, for a drunkard coming out of a debauch and realizing that he can never be cured, or for a criminal under sentence of death, suicide is not hard; nor is it for those badly equipped by nature, cheated by heredity, whose life is a neural torture. Hartmann's three stages of illusion suggest another paradox. He postulates a primal age when all men in their youth hoped to be happy before they died. Gradually as this was seen to be impossible, a second stage supervened when man placed his hope of anticipated happiness in another world. This slowly faded, and evolution left him no hope for himself, but only that his remote posterity might attain felicity here. This third recourse of optimism, however, is only a dream, for man and earth are both mori- bund. The race must sink with bubbling groans into un- known depths at last. This bankruptcy of all that is ideal leads him to renew the suggestion of Novalis, that the only true phi- losophy in it is for man to fix upon a moment, perhaps a few generations hence, when the whole human race will be educated to an agreement to commit suicide with a one, two, three, all together, in order that the energy which man has monopolized from the earth may flow back into and rejuvenate it, and a higher, better race more worthy to survive be evolved ions hence. This view, it may be said in passing, is perhaps a worthy counterpart to the ethics of Mailander's book, which finds the supreme motive to morality in pity for God called ab- solute, who has somehow been treacherously induced to break out into the creation of worlds as measles erupt in pimples, and who is therefore not happy and blessed but miserable, and whom it is man's highest duty to rescue from his transcendent negative eudccmonism. From this standpoint the only philosophy is that of negation, and virtue for both the individual and the race