After a peculiarly repulsive trial for murder in Paris, a wag sent the photograph of two hands, a right hand and a left hand, to the great criminologist, telling him they were those of the murderer, and asking for his opinion. He replied in a document crammed with the pompous terms of the scientific cheap-jack, hybrid Greek and Latin, and barbarous in the extreme. He discovered malformations in the fingers and twenty other mysteries of his craft, which exactly proved why these hands were necessarily and by the predestination of blind Nature the hands of a murderer. Then it was that the wag published his letter and the reply with the grave annotation that the left hand was his own (he was a man of letters) and the right hand that of an honest fellow who washed down his carriage.
The other anecdote is as follows: Lombroso produced a piece of fatuous nonsense about the Political Criminal Woman. He based it upon "the skull of Charlotte Corday"—which skull he duly analysed, measured, and labelled with the usual regiment of long and incomprehensible words. Upon the first examination of the evidence it turned out that the skull was no more Charlotte Corday's than Queen Anne's—a medical student had sold it to a humble Curiosity Shop, and the dealer, who seems to have had some intellectual affinity with the Lombroso tribe, had labelled it for purposes of sale, "The Skull of Charlotte Corday." Lombroso swallowed it.
The Ass!
XXXII THE BARBARIANS
The use of analogy, which is so wise and necessary a thing in historical judgment, has a knack of slipping into the falsest forms.
When ancient civilisation broke down its breakdown was accompanied by the infiltration of barbaric auxiliaries into the Roman armies, by the settlement of Barbarians (probably in small numbers), upon Roman land, and, in some provinces, by devastating, though not usually permanent, irruptions of barbaric hordes.
The presence of these foreign elements, coupled with the gradual loss of so many arts, led men to speak of "the Barbarian invasions" as though these were a principal cause of what was in reality no more than the old age and fatigue of an antique society.
Upon the model of this conception men, watching the dissolution of our own civilisation to-day, or at least its corruption, have asked themselves whence those Barbarians would come that should complete its final ruin. The first, the least scholarly and the most obvious idea was that of the swamping of Europe by the East. It was a conception which required no learning, nor even any humour. It was widely adopted and it was ridiculous. Others, with somewhat more grasp of reality, coined the phrase "that the barbarians which should destroy the civilisation of Europe were already breeding under the terrible conditions of our great cities." This guess contained, indeed, a half-truth, for though the degradation of human life in the great industrial cities of England and the United States was not a cause of our decline it was very certainly a symptom of it. Moreover, industrial society, notably in this country and in Germany, while increasing rapidly in numbers, is breeding steadily from the worst and most degraded types.