Evening in Old Vienna. [Volume: 4, Issue: 6, March, 1897, pp. 275-280]

276

THE AMERICAN JEWESS.

that the sins of the father is punished upon the children?" inquired the Turk.
"Those are but natural laws which no god of love
has had the power to change," exclaimed the Englishman.
"As our appointed story-teller has not appeared tonight, and we are so few here, I propose that the Doctor
ventilate his researches on this vital subject," remarked
the Editress.
All applauded the proposition, and Dr. Silber, complying with the request, said:
"The trouble of the day is that the daily press.makes
us too familiar with criminalities, and that through the
reading of so many frightful facts they lose the force
which they should exert on our actions. But in cases
of drunkenness we ought not to slacken and confound
this phase with ordinary misdeeds. There we have an
array of facts which are novel and startling, and to the
student of philosophy the most terrible ever revealed
by Statistics. Alcoholism, more than any other vice,
visits upon the children the sins of the parents. During the last ten years the criminal type has taken on a
new phase. Before that time the assassin was generally
a man in the vigor of his strength and manhood, but
nowadays it is the youth of barely twenty who murders.
Listen to this report of a recent trial, which I have
clipped from a newspaper," and the doctor took a few
papers from his pocket and read: " 'The jury hesitated
to condemn him on account of his youth, although they
were horrified at his cold-blooded ferocity, and at the
absence of moral sense which he displays.' And now
hear the remark annexed to statistics: 'In the haunts of
vice and misery in Paris are gutter children by the
thousands who are only waiting for the opportunity to
become assassins.' There is a threefold division of the
human mind," continued the doctor; "Intellect, Emotion and Will. Alcohol has its effect on the last. To
direct the use of the will force there must be an honest
balance of the emotions. There is no lack of brute
courage among the growing generation of criminals.
Their temperament is Alcoholic; that is, bold and violent, and their actions naturally correspond. The
hereditary alcoholist is very intelligent. There is no
lack of shrewdness in his plans-in his tactics of selfdefense. Usually he is also wilful. The difficulty in
young born criminals is the emotions. This explains
why the devotee of murder is often a person of courage
and intellect. I have no word which could express the
total absence of affectionate emotions in this new class
of criminals. The following extract enforces my sup