In dealing with occasional criminals whom it is not necessary or desirable to put into prison, liability to imprisonment should be substituted. The system of recognisances and of fines to the community, together with reparation to the injured individual, should be developed and extended to all cases to which it may suitably be applied. When the offender is unable to pay a pecuniary fine, he should not be imprisoned, but compelled to give his work.
The class of habitual drunkards requires special and compulsory treatment in special asylums.
CHAPTER VII.
CONCLUSIONS.
We have now seen, in its main outlines, the present condition of this question of the nature and treatment of the criminal. We have seen that criminality is a natural phenomenon, to be studied gravely and carefully according to natural methods; and that by natural and reasonable methods alone can the problem of its elimination be faced with any chance of success.
A simple and obvious conclusion it seems. Yet it is a conclusion not even yet generally accepted, and which is only beginning to find expression in our social life. It is still quite usual to find that crime is regarded as an abstract matter, not to be treated seriously unless the criminal himself is ignored. On the other hand, when the criminal comes in for discussion it is merely as a subject for sensational excitement, or unwholesome curiosity, as a creature to be vituperated or glorified without measure.
The criminal has always been the hero, almost the saint, of the uncultured. That attitude of unbounded reverence for the lunatic, as for an inspired being, and unquestioning submission to his wildest acts which to-day can scarcely be found in Europe outside Turkey, has by no means died out where the criminal is concerned, even in the most civilised country. The same reverence or amazement that the educated feel for the man of genius, the uneducated feel for the criminal.
The Romans gave the name of Hercules to great criminals after death, and dedicated a distinct cult to them. If we go back to a still more primitive phase of life as preserved in folk-lore, and still to some extent perpetuated, we find that all that belongs to an executed criminal brings luck. A finger or other small bone kept in the purse will preserve it from ever being empty. It also keeps away vermin, and protects a thief from his victim. Buried beneath the threshold it brings perpetual blessing, and to have a thief’s thumb among his goods is an excellent thing for a shopkeeper. The people came for the Marquise de Brinvilliers’s bones the day after her execution; they regarded her as a kind of saint, says Mme. de Sevigné. When at Breslau the old Rabenstein (the gallows) was broken down, a great trade was done by the workmen in the bones found beneath. Precious above all is the blood of a criminal; even a few drops on a rag are most costly. Such blood, when drunk, heals fevers and other diseases, just as the blood of gladiators was among the old Romans a cure for epilepsy. It must be drunk fresh, if possible warm. Bread dipped in this blood and eaten is good against the gout. The halter with which a criminal has been hanged has much power and brings luck. When it is struck three times on the threshold, the house is preserved from lightning. The same put into a beer cask with a criminal’s thumb has an excellent influence on the beer. In Franconia the fat of criminals is sometimes inquired for at the druggist’s, and a substance, so called, is handed over. When in Prussia executions took place in public, there was always friction between the armed guards and the crowd of women, who at all costs pressed forward with spoons, cups, and dishes to catch some of the blood. At the execution of a murderer at Hanau in 1861, several men leapt on to the scaffold and drank the steaming blood. At the execution of two murderers in Berlin in 1864, the executioner’s assistants dipped numbers of white handkerchiefs in the blood, and received two thalers for each. The bystanders even call upon the criminal for his most powerful intercession in Heaven. According to Pitré, there is still in Sicily a fetichistic adoration for the souls of the beheaded. The criminal is a person endowed with divine force, to be treated with awe and reverence, and whose blood and flesh have something of the old sacramental power of infusing the divine one’s energy into the body of him who eats of it.[112]