'Denn aus Gemeinem ist der Mensch gemacht,
Und die Gewohnheit nennt er seine Amme.'"
[Man has been shaped of what is common,
And habit is the nurse by whom he's reared.]
Evidently if he had understood it before he would not have been an anarchist. Whoever has observed in asylums the conduct of lunatics, will understand that one of their characteristics is originality, just as in men of genius; only the originality of the insane and of moral lunatics, or of born criminals, is very often absurd or unavailable.
This is why I, although I am an extremist in my partisanship for the death-penalty, cannot approve the shooting of the Communards and the hanging of the anarchist martyrs of Chicago. I deem it highly necessary to suppress born criminals, when they reach the persuasion that being born for evil they can do nothing but evil; and I believe that their death thus saves the lives of many honest men. But we have to do with a very different thing here, where the criminal type is, as shown above, less frequent than among born criminals.
It is also necessary to consider here the youthful condition of almost all these persons—Lingg 23 years, Schwab 33 years, Neebe 32 years. For at this age men are at the maximum point of their audacity and misoneism; and I remember a leading Russian Nihilist saying to me that there was not an honest man in Russia who was not a nihilist at 20 years of age and ultra-moderate at 40 years. If the inclination to evil here exists in greater proportion than in law-abiding men, it nevertheless takes an altruistic turn, which is quite the contrary to that which is observed among born criminals, and which commands our admiration and arouses our just pity. This inclination, in associating itself with the want of the new, which is also abnormal in humanity, could, if it were properly directed and were not crossed by misery, prove itself of great value to humanity; it could trace for it new routes, and in every case be practically useful to it. A born criminal imprisoned for life will kill some gaoler, in a colony will ally himself with the savages, and will never work; while political criminals in a colony will become more useful pioneers even than law-abiding men. An example is seen in Louise Michel, who in New Caledonia was the most charitable of the sick nurses.
And then there is no political crime against which the punishment of death can be directed. An idea is never stifled with the death of its abettors: it gains with the death of the martyrs if it is good, as is the case in revolutions; and it falls at once into vacuity if it is sterile, as is the case, perhaps, with the anarchists. And then, as judgment cannot be formed of a great man during his life, so a generation cannot in its ephemeral life judge with certainty of the justice of an idea, and for that reason it is not proper to inflict so radical a punishment on its abettors.
CESARE LOMBROSO.
INNOVATION AND INERTIA IN THE WORLD OF PSYCHOLOGY.
I. MISONEISM.
In the moral world the law which is seen to dominate all the others is the law of inertia. This law of inertia is so powerful that even after having been overcome by the friction of ages it always leaves, even among beings that have most progressed, traces of its original oscillation, in survivals, in rudimentary organs, when it is not renewed in all its completeness in certain atavistic forms.