“It is obvious that a diminution in the number of certain crimes may be brought about by an improvement in the social order. The impulse toward crime is undoubtedly quickly strengthened by social conditions, and also quickly made weaker. Political and religious offenses become so much the more numerous, the more definitely and relentlessly the dominant opinion takes its stand against diverse persuasions. If today a certain tendency in art were to attain state recognition and the protection of the criminal law, tomorrow the aesthetic heretic would be persecuted as the religious heretics were persecuted in earlier centuries. The sexual instinct will constantly long for satisfaction and take it where it finds it. If you prohibit the possibility of such satisfaction within the bounds of legality, the instinct will break the bonds and lead to crime. And whoever finds neither bread nor work will, in the great majority of cases, be able to discover ways and means of securing the one without the other at the expense of society.... ‘The beast in man’ is in all circles, in all strata of our society.... But the beast, with all its wild passions, with rage and hate, with covetousness and envy, with thirst for blood and insatiable vanity, is it not derived from father or mother, who have drained the pleasures of life or the woes of life to the dregs, who were corrupted in blood through their own fault, or without their own fault, before they gave life to the germ to which they imparted the curse of their forefathers as a heritage? “A reorganization of our social order will materially lessen the impulsion to crime in the men who are living today, but infinitely more important and infinitely more permanent will be its effect upon coming generations. While diminishing the number of those tainted by heredity it will tame the beast in man. This is no Utopia. It will be easier, perhaps, to underestimate the effect of such a transformation, than to appreciate its full value. “But which transformation? That is the question that we must answer, if we are not to be pushed aside as harmless visionaries. “Our entire education, in school as in life, rests upon suggestion. What keeps us from crime is the inhibitory ideas, which are instilled into us until they permeate our flesh and blood and control our actions, without our being conscious of it. ‘Thou shalt’, ‘thou shalt not’, these general prescriptions of right and morality, of religion and philanthropy, or whatever you choose to call it, must determine our conduct, unless we stop to consider, hesitate, and delay....