But to become a fanatical advocate of racial breeding, in the sense of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain, was rendered impossible to him by his recognition of the multiplicity of the population of Italy. No anthropologist was more intimately acquainted with the numerous and fundamentally different types inhabiting this country than was the discoverer of the mixed Africo-Hellene race of Calabria—the man who united in his own personality all the highest endowments of the Jewish spirit, and who from his study of the history of the Romance peoples of the Mediterranean region had learned to recognize the importance of the Semitic elements which have been intermingled in this region from the earliest dawn of history. CHAPTER V THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY The true significance of criminal anthropology is a matter with which few outside Italy have any real acquaintance, and least of all do those understand it who have most forcibly attacked Lombroso’s methods of work on account of their alleged defects. What is, then, the real significance of this doctrine? It is not merely that it is the starting-point of the reform movement in criminal procedure, in penal methods, and in the theory of jurisprudence; this, indeed, accounts for its practical significance. But its importance reaches far beyond the traditional contest between the prosecuting counsel and the experts, as to whether, in the case of an individual accused person, responsibility is diminished or absent. In legal circles, Lombroso does not play the undesirable rôle of the alienist who appeals to the prosecutor or to the judge with the assertion: “This man belongs to me, not to you, for he is a patient, an invalid.” But Lombroso, in the name of criminal anthropology, appeals to all those responsible for the enforcement of the criminal law in the following terms: “You are upon a false road. Neither the accused, nor the accuser, nor, finally, society at large, will be in the least helped or satisfied by your methods, by which you study the _crime_ dialectically and inquisitorially, and endeavour to apportion the punishment to the degree of blame. Criminal anthropology is not satisfied with demanding, with Mittelstaedt and Kraepelin, that we should do away with imprisonment, and abandon any attempt to measure out punishment. Criminal anthropology declares that the interest of society lies, not with the individual crime alone, but with the criminal. Every criminal is, in fact, even before the necessary social reaction has set in against him, or it may be on his behalf, the object of positive scientific study—_i.e._, of anthropological study. To ascertain whether his nature has been moulded by endogenous or by exogenous factors, to determine whether we have to do with a criminal nature (a born criminal), with an accidental or an occasional criminal, with an insane or a degenerate criminal, is the