Manifold causes produce crime; some men commit it from one cause: some
from another. Statistics only show the number of men who commit crime
from the various separate causes. In logic and philosophy it really
shows that, a certain heredity placed in a certain environment, will
meet obstructions and obstacles. Some heredities will carry men further,
and some environments will overcome them more quickly; but as surely as
effects follow from causes, every heredity will meet disaster in some
way under any environment, and the time and kind of disaster it meets
depend not upon perverseness or freedom of will, but upon the fortune of
the meeting of heredity with the manifold environment that surrounds
every life. It must be plain that life lasts only as long as it makes
adjustments. That it consists only of adjustments. That, ordinarily,
strong heredity and a good environment will serve the longest. That,
generally, a weak heredity and a poor environment will meet disaster
soonest. Life may be lengthened either by improving the heredity or the
environment or both. Whatever catastrophe overtakes it and the time it
falls depend not upon the will of the machine, but upon the character of
the machine that starts on the journey and the road it travels. The
disasters cannot in reason or justice be divided into criminal or
non-criminal. They are all natural; they are each and all inevitable.
Each is the inevitable destruction of a machine which could stand so
much, but which could stand no more. And in each, in spite of both
heredity and the general environment, the constant meeting with other
machines due to pure luck and chance is a great factor, if not the chief
factor, that determines the individual life.
XXXV
PARDONS AND PAROLES
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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