AS an introductory to this brief study, it may be premised that the celibate state is more favorable to sexual, as well as other forms of social delinquency, than the marital. Of a total criminal population in the United States, in 1892, 61.54 per cent, were tingle; 29.15 per cent, married, and the remaining 9.21 per cent, were set down as widowed, divorced, or "relation not stated;" and statistics of other countries, on the same matter, will not be found, I think, to vary materially from the figures given. This large percentage of criminality attaching to celibacy, however, will be found to involve other than psychological causes. It necessarily includes that considerable period of life, prior to the marriageable age, in which emotional acts are most frequent and unrestrained; and, in relation to sexual offences, a period during which the genesic function is naturally the most active and imperious. I shall not quote the statistics of rape, seduction, lust-murder, bestiality, and other sexual crimes, neither here nor elsewhere; space will not permit; but in stating a general fact,both here and subsequently, I trust the reader may do me the justice to assume that I do so only after having made myself thoroughly familiar with the data supporting it; and that the suppression of the latter, with their tedious masses of figures, is resorted to only as an aid to enforced brevity.

Indeed, in this secondary study of the sexual character, as it relates to criminal responsibility, it is not my purpose to deal so much with crime in the concrete as with the abstract psychological conditions which prompt and underlie it; and hence I shall be led in my inquiry into largely untrodden fields, and paths quite divergent from those ordinarily pursued in the study of criminal sociology.