VII
Ancient and Modern Crimes (Delitti Vecchi e Delitti Nuovi)
"This volume contains a collection of facts, sometimes valuable, at other times merely curious, that I was able to glean during long years of study in the field of criminal anthropology and psychiatry. They all tend to show the great difference that exists between ancient and modern crimes."
With these words my father begins the preface to this book, in which cases of recent crimes are described and compared with those committed in by-gone ages.
It is divided into three parts. The first part contains a comparative and statistical study of criminality in Europe, Mexico, the United States, and Australia.
The second part describes the careers of typical criminals of former times, such as the Tozzis of Rome, a family of anthropophagous criminals, and Vacher, Ballor, and other assassins of the Jack-the-Ripper type, whose perverted sexual instincts prompted them to murder a number of women and mutilate the corpses in a horrible fashion.
The third part treats of those modern criminals, like Holmes and Peace, who accomplish their misdeeds in a refined and elegant manner, substituting for the more brutal knife or hammer, the resources of chemistry, physics, and modern toxicology. In other cases, some product of modern times, such as the motor-car or bicycle, forms the motive for the crime, or is of assistance in its accomplishment.
"From the data we have been able to gather relating to crime in by-gone ages," continues my father in his preface, "we are led to conclude that crimes of a violent and bloody nature predominated exclusively in more barbarous times, and that fraudulent offences are characteristic of modern communities. Violence is more primitive than trickery and must always precede it, exactly as a more barbarous state in which property is gained or maintained by force, at the point of the sword, precedes a state in which ownership is regulated by means of contracts; and crime always adapts itself to the prevailing customs.
"The admirable work of Coghlan shows criminality in Australia to be of this latter type, as contrasted with its semi-barbarous nature in states like Mexico, and gives us a picture of the character it will assume a century or two later in Europe.
"As the fundamental nature of the criminal has not changed, his actions are still of the same character; and violence and cunning are mingled or alternate in modern crime. But though the individual remains unchanged, he is subordinated to a more powerful factor than himself—modern progress. It is true that many modern crimes are facilitated by modern contrivances; but the same contrivances often furnish means for their defeat; and so we may foresee a time, perhaps not very remote, when such anti-social elements shall partially, if not totally, have disappeared."