The word kleptomania is used to indicate the habit of stealing, by
those persons with whom wealth precludes the ordinary temptation to
the act. Certain women of position are regularly watched by clerks in
stores because they are known to carry off laces, ribbons, etc., when
they fancy themselves unobserved. Such women have very inferior minds
independent of this one vice. In the mother of such an one the desire
to get and to keep things of material value, must have been exceedingly
prominent. Many an honest mother mourns over the unscrupulous
dishonesty of her son, while all unwittingly she conveyed to him the
overpowering impulse; or there was not rigid probity enough in her own
life to overrule the dishonest tendency conveyed by her husband.
In the first case, her desire to get and to keep would be harmless and
justifiable as a temporary state of mind, if she were not pregnant.
She knows, although she does not often dwell on the fact, that she
is working assiduously for legitimate ends. But as she is, in truth,
mainly engrossed in getting and saving, thus using a very limited
part of her mind, she does the harm. The selfish, grasping spirit
increases on itself through generations of similar experience. On the
same principle, the _remarkable_ singer is the product of two or three
generations of love of song.
A childish inclination to appropriate that which belongs to another,
yields readily to wise treatment, where the intellect, the nature, is
not cramped and dull.