Certain casual homicides are plainly the result of social
conditions (gambling, drink, public opinion, &c.) in a much higher
degree than homicides which for the most part spring from
brutality, from the moral insensibility of individuals, or from
their psycho-pathological conditions, corresponding to abnormal
organic conditions.
In like manner, certain indecent assaults, incests, &c., are
largely the outcome of social environment, which, condemning a
number of persons to live in hovels without air or light,
with a promiscuity of sex between parents and children such as
obtains amongst the brutes, effaces or deadens all normal sense of
modesty. On the other hand, there are cases of rape and the like
which are mostly due to the biological condition of the
individual, either in manifest forms of sexual disease or, less
manifest though none the less actual, of biological anomaly.
For thefts, again, whilst occasional simple thefts are largely the
effect of social and economical conditions, this influence becomes
feebler in comparison with impulses due to the personal
constitution, organic and psychical, as, for instance, in the case
of thefts with violence, and especially of murder for the purpose
of robbery, which scoundrels of the ``swell-mob'' so frequently
commit in cold blood.
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