which
militate against a large birth-rate; but which are not present among the
former.

Our criminals, for the most part, commence their career of crime at an
early age. The Rev. W. D. Morrison of Wandsworth Prison, England,
declares that the most criminal age is reached between the years of
twenty and thirty. This holds good, he says, for Europe, Australia, and
the United States.

It is a mistake to suppose that a man first commits crime and then
plunges headlong into vice. Though true in some cases, it is exactly the
reverse course which is followed in the majority of cases. After having
passed with a measure of success through the milder domestic and
scholastic spheres, the youthful criminal become a failure in the
severer social or industrial sphere. Some criminologists go so far as to
say that the majority of criminals have displayed distinct evidences of
criminality at so early an age as sixteen years. Whatever may have been
the cause for committing crime, the crime itself shows that the youth
refuses to acknowledge the obligations which an organized society lays
upon him. This refusal extends practically throughout the social order,
and neither is it confined to this order, but extends also to the moral
order and is shown in a total disregard for the matrimonial state. The
youth gives way to natural appetites and associates himself with women
of low repute. He is of wandering habits, works, when he does work, but
intermittently, is restless, and totally disinclined towards matrimony.
Socially, industrially and morally he is unstable. It is these
conditions of his life which so contrast him with that species of
criminality which the "Jukes" family presents. And it is these same
conditions which support the statement of Fere and Ellis, that he is
generally a celibate and non-productive. Concerning the progeny of the
female criminal there is little to say except that the causes which
chiefly account for the male criminal operate to produce the prostitute
among women, and therefore criminal women are in a very small minority.
Of these criminal women, Lombroso says that they are monsters who have
triumphed over the natural instincts of piety and maternity as well as
over their natural weakness. They are bad mothers, and children are a
burden to them from which they will readily rid themselves.

Notwithstanding Dr Chapple's evidence, it is conclusive that his
statement that criminals have the largest families, is en