There are readers, perhaps, who will find that these qualities of the professional criminal give the lie to the environment hypothesis, since individual factors are recognized in a certain way. For myself I do not find it so. The qualities mentioned have nothing to do with crime as such; they can be utilized to the profit as well as to the detriment of society; it will depend upon the environment in which the individual endowed with them has been raised what direction he will take. It would not be difficult to name a number of historic celebrities (Napoleon, for example) who, if they had been born in the lower stratum of a great city, in place of in a favorable environment, would have had only the sad celebrity of criminals exceptionally endowed.
The psychology of this kind of criminals is not yet complete however. Besides intelligence, energy, and courage we find cupidity as their great characteristic.[426] They see others who can enjoy themselves without working hard, and it is their ambition to do the same, cost what it may. Since fate has made it impossible for them to attain it honestly they risk another method. This type of criminal is well delineated in the remark made by the notorious Lemaire, when he said to the president of the court: “If I were a property owner, I should not be here.”[427]
To have invested funds, to spend plenty of money, not to have to work much, this is their ideal; to share the lot of the working-man, who, notwithstanding his long and hard labor, never succeeds in procuring for himself the pleasures of the rich, makes life insipid in their eyes. M. Gisquet, former prefect of police, gives in his memoirs the following declaration made by Leblanc, the notorious professional criminal. “If I were not a thief by vocation I should become one by calculation; it is the best profession. I have computed the good and bad chances of all the others, and I am convinced by the comparisons that there is none more favorable or more independent than that of thief, nor one that does not offer at least an equal amount of danger.
“What should I have become in the society of honest men? [[586]]A natural child, with no one to protect me or to recommend me, I could only choose a disagreeable trade, become a delivery-boy in a store, or at most reach the miserable place of shipping clerk in a warehouse; and there, a supernumerary for many years, I should have died of hunger before I reached a salary of six hundred francs. As a workman in any class whatever you exhaust yourself quickly through the fatigues of your labor, to earn a miserable wage, and to live from day to day; then when accident, sickness, or old age come you must go beg or die in the poorhouse.…
“In our condition we depend only on ourselves; and if we acquire skill and experience at least they profit ourselves alone. I know very well that we have risks to run, that the police and the courts are at hand, that the prison is not very far distant; but out of eight thousand thieves in Paris, you never have more than seven or eight hundred in jail; that is not a tenth of the whole. We enjoy, then, on the average, nine years of liberty to one in prison. Well, where is the worker who has not a dead season? Besides, what does he do when he is without work? He carries his possessions to the Mont-de-Piété; while we others, if we are free, lack for nothing; our existence is a continual round of feasting and pleasure.”[428]
This is the type of the perfect egoist. In ranking men according to their social sentiments, such an individual would be put at the very lowest point in the scale. And then he has grown up under unfavorable circumstances (illegitimate birth, etc.). The innate egoism of this individual may perhaps be modified by the individual factor. But this in no way diminishes the truth of the environment hypothesis, for we are treating for the moment the question why this particular individual has become a criminal, and not that of the cause of the existence of professional criminals. And these two questions are far from being identical. The existence of individual differences is the reason why one runs more danger of becoming a professional criminal than another; but it is the environment which brings it about that the predisposed individual actually becomes such. The falsity of the environment hypothesis would be demonstrated if such individuals could be proved to become criminals under all circumstances. This is of course not the case. When individuals like these are not brought up in an atmosphere of poverty, they no longer see on the one side persons who enjoy everything while doing nothing, and on the other side those who, while toiling hard, live in poverty,—they will not [[587]]become examples of altruism indeed, but they will not become guilty of crime. They may even become very useful members of society, since they are generally more largely endowed with intelligence, energy, and courage than the average man. Rightly exercised, these qualities are very useful; but badly directed they are very harmful to society.[429]
So far we have been treating of the etiology of theft and analogous crimes; we shall conclude this section with some observations upon the causes that have led to the designating of these acts as crime.
Theft is a crime only because it is very harmful to society.[430] If in the majority of cases the individual does not take account of this, the assertion is nevertheless true. Everything that is harmful to society the individual considers as immoral. (Why this is so is a psychological question, with which we are not concerned here.) If we picture to ourselves present-day society, based as it is upon exchange, without the strict prohibition of theft, we shall see that it could not possibly exist. Life would be especially impossible in a society where the division of labor has attained a high degree of development, if it were permissible to take anything without giving an equivalent.
Since the human race has existed there has been private property, however trifling and unimportant it may have been. It is therefore very unlikely that theft has ever been permitted[431] (it is impossible to produce proofs in support of this), since it is difficult to imagine that anyone would consent to see himself stripped of things destined for his own use, to which, further he was more or less attached.[432] But there is a great difference between a prohibited act and a crime. It is proved that among primitive peoples theft is not reckoned among the crimes. Hear the opinion of one of the greatest specialists in this field, Dr. Post. “We find here and there a phenomenon very surprising from our modern point of view, namely that theft is not universally regarded as a misdemeanor, but the thief rather respected [[588]]for his cleverness. The maximum obligation that a theft lays upon the thief is simple restitution of the stolen property. The consequence of theft is thus simply the duty of restitution under the civil law.… Theft lies entirely outside of the province of criminal law.”[433]