Criminologically the influence of nurture on mankind is important if it
can explain the development of morality, honorableness, and love of
truth. The criminalist has to study relations, actions, and assertions,
to value and to compare them when they are differentiable only in terms
of the nurture of those who are responsible for them. The most
instructive works on this problem are those of Tarde,[296] and
Oelzelt-Newin.[297] Among the older writers Leibnitz had already said,
“If you leave education to me I’ll change Europe in a century.”
Descartes, Locke, Helvetius assign to nurture the highest possible value
while Carlyle, e.g., insists that civilization is a cloak in which wild
human nature may eternally burn with hellish fire. For moderns it is a
half-way house. Ribot says that training has least effect at the two
extremes of humanity--little and transitively on the idiot, much on the
average man, not at all on the genius. I might add that the circle of
idiots and geniuses must be made extremely large, for average people are
very few in number, and the increase in intellectual training has made
no statistical difference on the curve of crime. This is one of the
conclusions arrived at by Adolf Wagner[298] which corroborates the
experience of practising lawyers and we who have had, during the growth
of popular education, the opportunity to make observations from the
criminalistic standpoint, know nothing favorable to its influence. If
the general assertion is true that increased national education has
reduced brawling, damages to property, etc., and has increased
swindling, misappropriations, etc., we have made a great mistake. For
the psychological estimation of a criminal, the crime itself is not
definitive; there is always the question as to the damage this
individual has done his own nature with his deed. If, then, a peasant
lad hits his neighbor with the leg of a chair or destroys fences, or
perhaps a whole village, he may still be the most honorable of youths,
and later grow up into a universally respected man. Many of the best and
most useful village mayors have been guilty in their youth of brawls,
damages to property, resistance to authority, and similar things. But
if a man has once swindled or killed anybody, he has lost his honor,
and, as a rule, remains a scoundrel for the rest of his life. If for
criminals of the first kind we substitute the latter type we get a very
bad outlook.
Individuals yield similar experiences. The most important characteristic
of a somewhat cultivated man who not only is able to read and to write,
but makes some use of his knowledge, is a loudly-expressed discontent
with his existence. If he once has acquired the desire to read, the
little time he has is not sufficient to satisfy it, and when he has more
time he is always compelled to lay aside his volume of poetry to feed
the pigs or to clean the stables. He learns, moreover, of a number of
needs which he can not satisfy but which books have instilled in him,
and finally, he seeks illegal means, as we criminalists know, for their
satisfaction.
In many countries the law of such cases considers extenuating
circumstances and defective bringing-up, but it has never yet occurred
to a single criminalist that people might be likely to commit crime
because they could not read or write. Nevertheless, we are frequently in
touch with an old peasant as witness who gives the impression of
absolute integrity, reliability, and wisdom, so much so that it is gain
for anybody to talk to him. But though the black art of reading and
writing has been foreign to him through the whole of his life, nobody
will have any accusation to make against him about defective
bringing-up.
The exhibition of unattainable goods to the mass of mankind is a
question of conscience. We must, of course, assume that deficiency in
education is not in itself a reason for doubting the witness, or for
holding an individual inclined to crime. The mistakes in bringing-up
like spoiling, rigor, neglect, and their consequences, laziness, deceit,
and larceny, have a sufficiently evil outcome. And how far these are at
fault, and how far the nature of the individual himself, can be
determined only in each concrete case by itself. It will not occur to
anybody to wish for a return to savagery and anarchy because of the low
value we set on the training of the mind. There is still the business of
moral training, and its importance can not be overestimated. Considering
the subject generally, we may say that the aim of education is the
capacity of sympathizing with the feeling, understanding, and willing of
other minds. This might be supplemented, perhaps, also with the
limitation that the sympathy must be correct, profound, and implicative,
for external, approximate, or inverted sympathy will obviously not do.
The servant girl knows concerning her master only his manner of
quarreling and his manner of spitting but is absolutely unaffected by,
and strange to his inner life. The darker aspects of culture and
civilization are most obvious in the external contacts of mankind.
When we begin to count an intelligent sympathy, it must follow that the
sympathy is possible only with regard to commonly conceivable matters;
that we must fundamentally exclude the essential inward construction of
the mind and the field of scientific morality. Hence we have left only
religion, which is the working morality of the populace.
According to Goethe, the great fundamental conflict of history is the
conflict of belief with doubt. A discussion of this conflict is
unnecessary here. It is mentioned only by way of indicating that the
sole training on which the criminalist may rely is that of real
religion. A really religious person is a reliable witness, and when he
is behind the bar he permits at least the assumption that he is
innocent. Of course it is difficult to determine whether he is genuinely
religious or not, but if genuine religion can be established we have a
safe starting point. Various authors have discussed the influence of
education, _pro_ and _con_. Statistically, it is shown that in Russia,
only 10% of the population can read and write, and still of 36,868
condemned persons, no fewer than 26,944 were literate. In the seventies
the percentage of criminals in Scotland was divided as follows, 21%
absolutely illiterate, 52.7 half educated; 26.3% well educated.
The religious statistics are altogether worthless. A part of them have
nothing to do with religion, e.g., the criminality of Jews. One part is
worthless because it deals only with the criminality of baptized
Protestants or Catholics, and the final section, which might be of great
interest, i.e., the criminality of believers and unbelievers, is
indeterminable. Statistics say that in the country _A_ in the year _n_
there were punished x% Protestants, y% Catholics, etc. Of what use is
the statement? Both among the x and the y percentages there were many
absolute unbelievers, and it is indifferent whether they were Protestant
or Catholic unbelievers. It would be interesting to know what percentage
of the Catholics and of the Protestants are really faithful, for if we
rightly assume that a true believer rarely commits a crime, we should be
able to say which religion from the view point of the criminalist should
be encouraged. The one which counts the greater percentage of believers,
of course, but we shall never know which one that is. The numbers of
the “Protestant” criminals, and those of the “Catholics,” can not help
us in the least in this matter.