For if your conviction
concerning such circumstances were sincere, you would go to the bottom
of them and examine with the light of your understanding all those
innumerable conditions which contribute toward those extenuating
circumstances. But what are those extenuating circumstances? Family
conditions? Take it that a child is left alone by its parents, who are
swallowed up in the whirl of modern industry, which overthrows the laws
of nature and forbids the necessary rest, because steam engines do not
get tired and day work must be followed by night work, so that the
setting of the sun is no longer the signal for the laborer to rest, but
to begin a new shift of work. Take it that this applies not alone to
adults, but also to human beings in the growing stage, whose muscular
power may yield some profit for the capitalists. Take it that even the
mother, during the period of sacred maternity, becomes a cog in the
machinery of industry. And you will understand that the child must grow
up, left to its own resources, in the filth of life, and that its
history will be inscribed in criminal statistics, which are the shame of
our so-called civilization.
Of course, in this first lecture I cannot give you even a glimpse of the
positive results of that modern science which has studied the criminal
and his environment instead of his crimes. And I must, therefore, limit
myself to a few hints concerning the historical origin of the positive
school of criminology.
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