The Positive School of Criminology | Page 4

against crime in the human and social life itself. The
simultaneous publication of these three monographs caused a stir. The
teachers of classic criminology, who had taken kindly to the
recommendations of Pessina and Ellero, urging them to study the
natural sources of crime, met the new ideas with contempt, when the
new methods made a determined and radical departure, and became not
only the critics, but the zealous opponents of the new theories. And this
is easy to understand. For the struggle for existence is an irresistible
law of nature, as well for the thousands of germs scattered to the winds
by the oak, as for the ideas which grow in the brain of man. But
persecutions, calumnies, criticisms, and opposition are powerless
against an idea, if it carries within itself the germ of truth. Moreover,
we should look upon this phenomenon of a repugnance in the average
intellect (whether of the ordinary man or the scientist) for all new ideas
as a natural function. For when the brain of some man has felt the light
of a new idea, a sneering criticism serves us a touchstone for it. If the
idea is wrong, it will fall by the wayside; if it is right, then criticisms,
opposition and persecution will cull the golden kernel from the
unsightly shell, and the idea will march victoriously over everything
and everybody. It is so in all walks of life--in art, in politics, in science.
Every new idea will rouse against itself naturally and inevitably the
opposition of the accustomed thoughts. This is so true, that when
Cesare Beccaria opened the great historic cycle of the classic school of
criminology, he was assaulted by the critics of his time with the same
indictments which were brought against us a century later.
When Cesare Beccaria printed his book on crime and penalties in 1774
under a false date and place of publication, reflecting the aspirations
which gave rise to the impending hurricane of the French revolution;
when he hurled himself against all that was barbarian in the mediaeval
laws and set loose a storm of enthusiasm among the encyclopedists,
and even some of the members of government, in France, he was met
by a wave of opposition, calumny and accusation on the part of the
majority of jurists, judges and lights of philosophy. The abbé Jachinci
published four volumes against Beccaria, calling him the destroyer of
justice and morality, simply because he had combatted the tortures and
the death penalty.

The tortures, which we incorrectly ascribe to the mental brutality of the
judges of those times, were but a logical consequence of the
contemporaneous theories. It was felt that in order to condemn a man,
one must have the certainty of his guilty, and it was said that the best
means of obtaining tins certainty, the queen of proofs, was the
confession of the criminal. And if the criminal denied his guilt, it was
necessary to have recourse to torture, in order to force him to a
confession which he withheld from fear of the penalty. The torture
soothed, so to say, the conscience of the judge, who was free to
condemn as soon as he had obtained a confession. Cesare Beccaria rose
with others against the torture. Thereupon the judges and jurists
protested that penal justice would be impossible, because it could not
get any information, since a man suspected of a crime would not
confess his guilt voluntarily. Hence they accused Beccaria of being the
protector of robbers and murderers, because he wanted to abolish the
only means of compelling them to a confession, the torture. But Cesare
Beccaria had on his side the magic power of truth. He was truly the
electric accumulator of his time, who gathered from its atmosphere the
presage of the coming revolution, the stirring of the human conscience.
You can find a similar illustration in the works of Daquin in Savoy, of
Pinel in France, and of Hach Take in England, who strove to bring
about a revolution in the treatment of the insane. This episode interests
us especially, because it is a perfect illustration of the way traveled by
the positive school of criminology. The insane were likewise
considered to blame for their insanity. At the dawn of the 19th century,
the physician Hernroth still wrote that insanity was a moral sin of the
insane, because "no one becomes insane, unless he forsakes the straight
path of virtue and of the fear of the Lord."
And on this assumption the insane were locked up in horrible dungeons,
loaded down with chains, tortured and beaten, for lo! their insanity was
their own fault.
At that period, Pinel advanced the revolutionary idea that insanity was
not a sin, but a disease like all other diseases. This idea is