For since paper money--from want or for reasons of
expediency--has become a substitute of metal coin in the civilized
countries, the making of counterfeit paper money has become very
frequent in the nineteenth century. Now a counterfeiter, in committing
his crime, must compel his mind to imitate closely the inscription of
the bill, letter for letter, including that threatening passage, which
says: _"The law punishes counterfeiting_ ..." etc. Can you see before
your mind's eye a counterfeiter, in the act of engraving on the stone or
the others may ignore the penalty that awaits them, but he cannot. This
illustration is convincing, for in cases of other crimes one may always
assume that the criminal acted without thinking of the future, even when
he was not in a transport of passion. But in the case of the
counterfeiter the very act of committing the crime reminds him of the
threat of the law, and yet he is imperturbable while perpetrating it.
Crime has its natural causes, which lie outside of that mathematical
point called the free will of the criminal. Aside from being a juridical
phenomenon, which it would be well to examine by itself, every crime is
above all a natural and social phenomenon, and should be studied
primarily as such. We need not go through so hard a course of study
merely for the purpose of walking over the razor edge of juristic
definitions and to find out, for instance, that from the time Romagnosi
made a distinction between incompleted and attempted crime rivers of ink
have been spilled in the attempt to find the distinguishing elements of
these two degrees of crime.
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