Even richer in facts, and more engrossing in consequence of vivid description and apt characterization, is the analysis, in chapters vii. to xii., of the individual factors of political crime. The significance of age and sex are studied, and we find a detailed description of the female protagonists of Russian nihilism, who are depicted as the noblest examples of the “revolutionist by passion.” A description is then given of the born criminals and the morally diseased among rebels and insurgents, with a full account of their individual peculiarities. Proof is submitted of the great part played in all important insurrectionary movements by the insane and the partially insane (“mattoids”). An elaborate account is given of the characteristics and influence of the “political occasional criminals and political criminals by passion,” who are closely allied to the revolutionary genius, and commonly exhibit a noble type of character. Whereas among the French revolutionaries of 1793, among the revolters in South America, the rioters of the Paris Commune, and the modern anarchists, Lombroso finds the most bestial criminal natures and the most horrible moral insanity predominant, among the heroes of the prolonged Italian struggle for freedom and among the so-called nihilists he describes a number of anthropologically normal and noble figures, from whom nothing is more remote than degeneration, criminality, or mental disorder. The chapter is illustrated by a large number of portraits, including those of Louise Michel, Ibarbar, Reinsdorf, and Hödel, as criminal physiognomies; and contrasted with these are the noble countenances of Mazzini, Bakunin, Scheljabow, Wjera, Sassulitsch, Perowskaja, etc.

At the end of this first part of his book, Lombroso sums up the whole of his material for a differential diagnosis between revolution and revolt. Then follows the second part, which was written in collaboration with a young jurist, the Veronese advocate Laschi. Here we have an historical account of the genesis of political crime, with a description of the earlier and more recent methods of dealing with it, both national and international; and an attempt is made, from the standpoint gained in the first part, to formulate juridically the principal elements of political criminology, and to reconstruct the foundations of its penal repression. The conclusion consists of a detailed account of the economic and political prophylaxis of “political crime,” in which from time to time—and more especially in the criticism of Italian parliamentary government and party politics—Lombroso’s original modes of thought are strikingly manifest. For the most part, however, these prophylactic prescriptions have reference merely to co-operative associations, insurance against unemployment, and a number of political measures of a more or less “State-Socialist” character of no particular originality, and derived, as it seems to me, in part from the ideas of Luigi Luzzati (the present Minister President), and in part from those of Achille Loria.

The chief merits of the book are not found here, but in its historico-philosophical ideas, which in this concluding portion are but slightly sketched, and in the masterly manner in which, with the aid of a vast material, the foundations are laid of our knowledge of the psychology of the rebel, whose lineaments are depicted with the truest perception of nature and of history.

Lombroso’s daily contact with prisoners awaiting trial, owing to his official position as medical officer to the prison at Turin, the criticisms passed from the legal side upon his doctrine of the “born criminal,” and the continued exchange of ideas with so distinguished an expert in the theory of jurisprudence as Enrico Ferri, led him in twenty years’ ensuing work, in which he accumulated an enormous mass of observations of his own, and utilized the entire international literature of the subject, to study the criminal by passion, the occasional criminal (economic etiology of crime), the habitual criminal, and other abnormal categories of criminals (in addition to the born criminal)—criminal alcoholics, criminal lunatics, and criminal epileptics. The results of all this work were incorporated in the third, fourth, and fifth editions of “L’uomo delinquente.” From the year 1880 onwards he was assisted in this gigantic undertaking by able personal assistants, and from this year dates the issue of his Archivia di psichiatria, in the production of which he enjoyed the collaboration of an international circle of colleagues. At the same time, the doors of all Italian prisons were open, not to him only, but also to his pupils and fellow-workers—an advantage which I myself occasionally enjoyed. Beltrani-Scalia,[[23]] the chief of the Italian prison administration, placed at Lombroso’s disposal the entire official material of his department; and Lombroso utilized this, not only to strengthen and develop his theories, but also for the foundation of a unique criminal museum, and for the preparation of carefully-thought-out plans of penal reform. From every quarter materials streamed in, by which hundreds of heads and hands were kept busy. Lombroso’s grown-up daughters, Paola and Gina, became readers, translators, actuaries, and sub-editors; and the house in the great square of Turin, from which in the evening can be seen the sunset glow on the peaks of the western Alps, became, not only the collecting centre of the materials pouring in from every direction (ultimately even from the slowly-moving Anglo-Saxon world), not only the source of an extensive journalistic propaganda (in Germany furthered by Maximilian Harden’s paper, Zukunft, which even then had a wide and increasing circulation), but, in addition, the meeting-place of numerous foreign investigators engaged in the study of the social and biological sciences. Here the heavy red wine of Piedmont, which was supplied with no sparing hand, loosened many tongues; but wine was assuredly not the sole enlivening element in the house, in which distinguished simplicity and a patriarchal atmosphere combined to melt the chill reserve no less of the Prussian Privy Councillor than of the English University Professor, so that the conversation of all was brilliant and unrestrained.

These years of propaganda and of practical efforts on behalf of reform—1885 to 1900—undoubtedly owed a part of their brilliancy and of their practical fruitfulness to Lombroso’s daughters, who first by means of their women friends (among whom I may give the leading place to the social reformer, Madame Kuliszew), and subsequently by means of their affianced husbands (G. Ferrero and M. Carrara), brought fresh worlds of ideas into contact with that of their father. To the elements already enumerated were added music and the plastic arts, and the friendship of such artists as Bistolfi—drawings and sketches by living artists, and casts of celebrated sculptures were dispersed among the skulls and the books with which almost every room in the house was filled. The glorious harmonies of Beethoven and Wagner were not only re-echoed in the hearts alike of young and old among the audience, but also resounded from the skulls of ancient Peruvians and from painted prison-utensils. This was the environment from which came the masterly sketch of the nature of woman; and thus it came to pass that the anthropology of calculus and measuring-rule receded into the background, and was replaced by a profound psychological insight. As a result of such stimuli, and of others too numerous to mention, there originated the intimate analysis of the criminal mentality, in consequence of which the criminal is no longer regarded merely as the savage and atavistic descendant of the prehistoric mammoth-hunter, but rather as one in whom the observer now perceives also, and depicts with the sure hand of a master, the lineaments of an unfortunate being impelled to crime by his passions, by the pressure of want, by exploitation and impoverishment. At the same time the psychological description of the born criminal nature gained additional clearness of detail and sharpness of outline. We must look for this description, not only in the last edition of the chief work, but also in the numerous monographs on individual criminals whose offences attracted public attention during these years of Lombroso’s ripest knowledge and fullest creative force. The last of these figures was the Parisian, Madame Steinheil.[[24]]

Lombroso’s criminal psychology deserves much more attention than it has hitherto received. In relation to the practical problems of criminal jurisprudence it is more important than were his purely anthropological investigations, although these latter have attracted far greater popular notice. Alike to the expert in forensic medicine and to the psychiatrist, criminal psychology possesses greater diagnostic importance; for it is often necessary to determine whether, in a certain individual, acquired mental infirmity, congenital mental infirmity, or some special and peculiar type of degeneracy, predominates. It is not permissible for the medical jurist to argue as follows: “This individual has remarkable physical characters and incomprehensible psychical peculiarities, and he is therefore ill and irresponsible.” The incomprehensible character of a crime or the enigmatical character of a personality is not rarely used as an argument for the belief that mental disorder, and consequent irresponsibility, exists. But this is not a valid inference. A knowledge of the psychology of the respectable bourgeois and of that of the ordinary philistine, or a limited acquaintance with the insane confined in institutions, does not provide any experience of the interweaving of complicated and peculiar motives and feelings in the psyche of the criminal nature. A thorough knowledge of criminal psychology, which is rare to-day,[[25]] and which, for obvious reasons, is difficult to obtain, is an essential preliminary for the distinction of criminal natures from the insane and from imbeciles.

Not infrequently it is maintained that the performer of a criminal act cannot be normal if we are unable to discover any profit which he could have derived from his act. The characteristic of a criminal, it is held, is to injure others to gain a personal advantage; but to injure others simply for the sake of doing injury is said to be characteristic of psychological anomaly.

This assumption is contradicted by two fundamental traits of the criminal nature—recklessness of consequences and cruelty. The recklessness of the criminal nature leads him rather to yield to momentary impulses than to pursue a deliberate purposive plan. The cruel individual, not only as criminal, but also as savage, as despot, as violent leader of a mob, takes a positive pleasure in others’ suffering. Nothing, for example, is commoner in the school and the barrack than such a phenomenon as this. To a certain degree, indeed, we find it in the average man, in the normal philistine and the pedant, perhaps, more than all, although only in a low degree of intensity. Many criminal natures undoubtedly possess this tendency to a very high degree, and take a positive delight in the thought of being able to inflict pain and fear on others. But herein they merely exhibit, after their own fashion, a general tendency of human nature to find pleasure in the possession and exercise of power, and thus to feel superior to others, and to manifest this superiority by means of the infliction of pain.

In this sphere of cruelty there is certainly no more than a quantitative difference between the criminal nature and the normal philistine, and least of all will one who is really familiar with the erotic life of mankind, which is the principal sphere of the mutual infliction of suffering, maintain that in its association with cruelty there is anything that can be termed pathological.

Unquestionably, many crimes are committed because the injury inflicted upon another is in some way profitable to the criminal. This, indeed, is little more than a matter of business. But just as many crimes are committed because the injury of another is painful to that other, and because the criminal—the usurer, for example—actually experiences pleasure in having given rise to others’ pain.