Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

people are inclined to excuse whatever they find themselves guilty of. On the contrary, we are inclined to punish others most harshly where we ourselves are most guilty. And there is still another side to the matter. When an honest, well-conducted woman commits petty crimes, she does not consider them as crimes, she is unaware of their immorality, and it would be illogical for her to see as a crime in others that which she does not recognize as a crime in herself. It is for this reason that she tends to excuse her neighbor’s derelictions. Now, when we try to find out from feminine witnesses facts concerning the objects on which we properly lay stress, they do not answer and cause us to make mistakes. What woman thinks is mere “sweet-tooth” in her servant girl, is larceny in criminal law; what she calls “pin-money,” we call deceit, or violation of trust; for the man whom the woman calls “the dragon,” we find in many cases quite different terms. And this feminine attitude is not Christian charity, but ignorance of the law, and with this ignorance we have to count when we examine witnesses. Of course, not only concerning some theft by a servant girl, but always when we are trying to understand some human weakness.

 

From honesty to loyalty is but a step. Often these traits lie side by side or overlap each other. Now, the criminal justice has, more frequently than appears, to deal with feminine loyalty. Problems of adultery are generally of subordinate significance only, but this loyalty or disloyalty often plays the most important r<o^>le in trials of all conceivable crimes, and the whole problem of evidence takes a different form according to the assumption that this loyalty does, or does not, exist. Whether it is the murder of a husband, doubtful suicide, physical mutilation, theft, perversion of trust, arson, the case takes a different form if feminine disloyalty can be proved. The rare reference to this important premise in the presentation of evidence is due to the fact that we are ignorant of its significance, that its determinative factors are hidden, and finally that its presentation is as a rule difficult.

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Public opinion on feminine loyalty is not flattering. Diderot asserts that there is no loyal woman who has not ceased being so, at least, in her imagination. Of course this does not mean much, for all of us have ideally committed many sins, but if Diderot is right, one may assume a feminine inclination to disloyalty. Most responsible for this is, of course, the purely sexual character of woman, but we must not do her the injustice, and ourselves the harm, of supposing that this character is the sole regulative principle; the illimitable feminine need for change is also responsible to a great degree. I doubt whether it could be proved in any collection of cases worth naming that a woman grew disloyal although her sexual needs were small; but that her sex does so is certain, and thence we must seek other reasons for their disloyalty. The love of change is fundamental and may be observed in recorded criminal cases.

“Even educated women,” says Goltz,[1] “can not bear continuous and uniform good fortune, and feel an inconceivable impulse to devilment and foolishness in order to get some variety in life.”

Now it will be much easier for the judge to determine whether the woman in the case had at the critical time an especial inclination to this “devilment,” than to discover whether her own husband was sexually insufficient, or whatever similar secrets might be involved.

 

If woman, however, once has the impulse to seek variety, and the harmless and permissible changes she may provide herself are no longer sufficient or are lacking, the movement of her daily life takes a questionable direction. Then there is a certain tendency to deceit which is able to bring its particular consequences to bear.

A woman has married, let us say, for love, or for money, for spite, to please her parents, etc., etc. Now come moments in her life in which she reflects concerning “her” reason for marriage, and the cause of these moments will almost always be her husband, i. e., he may have been ill-mannered, have demanded too much, have refused something, have neglected her, etc., and thus have wounded her so that her mood, when thinking of the reason of her marriage, is decidedly bad, and she begins to doubt whether her love was really so strong, whether the money was worth the trouble, whether she ought not to have opposed her parents, etc. And suppose she had waited, might she not have done better? Had she not deserved better? Every step in her musing takes her farther [1] Bogumil Goltz: Zur Charakteristik u. Naturgeschichte der Frauen. Berlin 1863.

 

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from her husband. A man is nothing to a woman to whom he is not everything, and if he is nothing he deserves no especial consideration, and if he is undeserving, a little disloyalty is not so terrible, and finally, the little disloyalty gradually and naturally and smoothly leads to adultery, and adultery to a chain of crimes.

That this process is not a thousand times more frequent, is merely due to the accident that the right man is not at hand during these so-called weak moments. Millions of women who boast of their virtue, and scorn others most nobly, have to thank their boasted virtue only to this accident. If the right man had been present at the right time they would have had no more ground for pride. There is only a simple and safe method for discovering whether a woman is loyal to her husband—lead her to say whether her husband neglects her. Every woman who complains that her husband neglects her is an adulteress or in the way of becoming one, for she seeks the most thrifty, the really sound reason which would justify adultery. How close she has come to this sin is easily discoverable from the degree of intensity with which she accuses her husband.

 

Besides adultery, the disloyalty of widow and of bride, there is also another sense in which disloyalty may be important. The first is important only when we have to infer some earlier condition, and we are likely to commit injustice if we judge the conduct of the wife by the conduct of the widow. As a rule there are no means of comparison. In numerous cases the wife loves her husband and is loyal to him even beyond the grave, but these cases always involve older women whom lust no longer affects. If the widow is at all young, pretty, and comparatively rich, she forgets her husband.

If she has forgotten him, if after a very short time she has again found a lover and a husband, whether for “the sake of the poor children,” or because “my first one, of blessed memory, desired it,”

or because “the second and the first look so much alike,” or whatever other reason she might give, there is still no ground for supposing that she did not love her first husband, was disloyal to him, robbed and murdered him. She might have borne the happiest relations with him; but he is dead, and a dead man is no man. There are, again, cases in which the almost immediate marriage of a new-made widow implies all kinds of things, and often reveals in the person of the second husband the murderer of the first. When suspicions of such a situation occur, it is obviously necessary to go very slowly, but the first thing of importance is to keep tabs carefully on the <p 350>

second husband. It is exceedingly self-contradictory in a man to marry a woman he knows to have murdered her first husband—

but if he had cared only about being her lover there would not have been the necessity of murdering the first.

 

The opposite of this type is anticipatory disloyalty of a woman who marries a man in order to carry on undisturbed her love-affair with another. That there are evil consequences in most cases is easy to see. Such marriages occur very frequently among peasants.

The woman, e. g., is in love with the son of a wealthy widower.

The son owns nothing, or the father refuses his permission, so the woman makes a fool of the father by marrying him and carries on her amour with the son, doubly sinful. Instead of a son, the lover may be only a servant, and then the couple rob the husband thoroughly —especially if the second wife has no expectations of inheritance, there being children of a former marriage. Variations on this central theme occur as the person of the lover changes to neighbor, cousin, friend, etc., but the type is obvious, and it is necessary to consider its possibilities whenever suspicion arises.

 

The disloyalty of a bride—well, we will not bother with this poetical subject. Everybody knows how merciless a girl can be, how she leaves her lover for practical, or otherwise ignoble reasons, and everybody knows the consequences of such things.[1]

 

Section 75. (c) Love, Hate and Friendship.

 

If Emerson is right and love is no more than the deification of persons, the criminalist does not need to bother about this very rare paroxysm of the human soul. We might translate, at most, a girl’s description of her lover who is possibly accused of some crime, from deified into human, but that is all. However, we do not find that sort of love in the law courts. The love we do find has to be translated into a simpler and more common form than that of the poet.

The sense of self-sacrifice, with which Wagner endows his heroines, is not altogether foreign in our work; we find it among the lowest proletarian women, who immolate themselves for their husbands, follow them through the most tremendous distress, nurse and sustain them with hungry heroism. This is more remarkable than poetical self-sacrifice, but it is also different and is to be differently explained.

The conditions which cause love can be understood in terms of the effects and forces of the daily life. And where we can not see it [1] Sergi: Archivio di Psichologia. 1892. Vol. XIII.

 

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differently we shall be compelled to speak of it as if it were a disease.

If disease is not sufficient explanation, we shall have to say with the Italians, “l’amore <e’> une castigo di Dio.”

 

Love is of greater importance in the criminal court than the statutes allow, and we frequently make great mistakes because we do not count it in. We have first of all to do our duty properly, to distinguish the biological difference between the human criminal and the normal human being, rather than to subsume every criminal case under its proper statute. When a woman commits a crime because of jealousy, when in spite of herself she throws herself away on a good-for-nothing; when she fights her rival with unconquerable hatred; when she bears unbelievable maltreatment; when she has done hundreds of other things—who counts her love?

She is guilty of crime; she is granted to have had a motive; and she is punished. Has enough been done when the jury acquits a jealous murderess, or a thrower of vitriol? Such cases are spectacular, but no attention is paid to the love of the woman in the millions of little cases where love, and love only, was the impulse, and the statute sentencing her to so and so much punishment was the outcome.

 

Now, study the maniacally-clever force of jealousy and then ask who is guilty of the crime. Augustine says, that whoever is not jealous is not in love, and if love and jealousy are correlate, one may be inferred from the other.