It would appear, then, from this that heredity chiefly affects the erotic appetite, and through it the entire character. The impure beget the impure, subject to improvement through grace and will-power, and, despite of changed environments, the diseased appetite of the progenitor is apt to assert itself in the descendant, though it is not, of course, so apparent in the matter of the erotic passion as in the alcoholic. These are the facts so far as they justify the view of crime as a neurosis. This conclusion, while harmonizing with the data of observation, renders the solution of the question, What shall we do with criminals? comparatively easy, and points to the best mode of treatment. Until society holds that the virtue of purity is at the bottom of public morality, and that the custom to look indulgently on the wicked courses of young men is essentially pernicious, we cannot hope to begin the work of reform on a sound basis. _Corrumpere et corrumpi sœclum vocatur_ is as true to-day as eighteen hundred years ago, only now we call it “sowing wild oats.” And how is this change to be wrought? By education? Yes, by education, which develops man’s moral character—by that education which gives to the community a Christian scholar, and not a mere intellectual machine. Mr. Richard Vaux, ex-mayor of Philadelphia, who is a believer in Maudsley, and consequently an unsuspected authority, speaks in these significant terms:
“Without attempting to discuss the value of popular instruction for the youth, or to criticise any system of public or private education, we venture to assert that there are crimes which arise directly out of these influences, and which require knowledge so obtained to perpetrate. If the former suggestion be true, that the compression of the social forces induces to crime, then those offences which come from education are only the more easily forced into society by the possessed ability to commit such crimes. _If facts warrant this suggestion, then education—meaning that instruction imparted by school-training—is an agent in developing crime-cause...._ It is worthy of notice that a far larger number of offenders are recorded as having attended ‘public schools’ than those who ‘never went to school.’”[10]