“Thus, to make our manner of procedure plain by an example, anyone who examines too closely a small portion of a very great circumference traced upon a plane, will see in this portion only a certain number of physical points, assembled in a more or less accidental way.... From a greater distance his eye will take in a greater number of points, which will already appear regularly distributed in an arc of a certain extent; soon, if the observer continues to recede, he loses sight of the individual points ... grasps the law that has presided over their general arrangement, and recognizes the nature of the curve traced.... “It is in this way that we shall study the laws that concern the human race; for when we examine them from too near at hand it becomes impossible to grasp them; we are struck only with individual peculiarities, which are infinite.” [32] “In all that relates to crimes, the same figures are reproduced with such constancy that it is impossible to misconstrue them, even in the case of those crimes which, it would seem, should be most likely to escape human prevision, such as homicides, since these are in general committed as a consequence of quarrels arising without motive, and under apparently fortuitous circumstances. Experience, however, proves that not only is the annual number of homicides nearly constant, but that even the weapons employed are used in the same proportions. What can be said then of crimes that are the result of reflection? “This constancy with which the same crimes reappear annually in the same order, and lead to the same penalties in the same proportions, is one of the most curious of the facts that we learn from court statistics.... A budget which we pay with frightful regularity is that of the jails, the penitentiaries, and the gallows.... We can enumerate in advance how many individuals will stain their hands with the blood of their fellows, how many will be forgers, how many poisoners; almost as we can predict the births and deaths.... “Society contains within itself the germs of all the crimes that are about to be committed. It is society, in a way, which prepares them, and the criminal is only the instrument that executes them. “Every social state supposes, then, a certain number and certain order of crimes as a necessary consequence of its organization. This remark, which might appear discouraging at first sight, becomes consoling, on the contrary, when we consider it more closely, since it shows the possibility of the improvement of men, by the modification of their institutions and habits and whatever, in general, influences their manner of being. At bottom this is only the extension of the well known law ... that so far as the same causes are present we must expect the repetition of the same effects. What has produced the belief that this did not apply to moral phenomena is the too great influence commonly ascribed to man in matters relating to his actions.” [33]