* Another equally efficacious means of dealing with the matter would be to substitute, upon a defendant’s plea of insanity, a full jury of experts—­like any “special” jury—­for the ordinary petit jury.

There is good reason to hope that we may soon see in all the states adequate provision for preliminary examination upon the plea of insanity, and a new test of criminal responsibility consistent with humanity and modern medical knowledge.  Even then, although murderers who indulge in popular crime will probably be acquitted on the ground of insanity, we shall at least be spared the melancholy spectacle of juries arbitrarily committing feeble-minded persons charged with homicide to imprisonment at hard labor for life, and in a large measure do away with the present unedifying exhibition of two groups of hostile experts, each interpreting an archaic and inadequate test of criminal responsibility in his own particular way, and each conscientiously able to reach a diametrically opposite conclusion upon precisely the same facts.

CHAPTER XI

The Mala Vita in America

There are a million and a half of Italians in the United States, of whom nearly six hundred thousand reside in New York City—­more than in Rome itself.  Naples alone of all the cities of Italy has so large an Italian population; while Boston has one hundred thousand, Philadelphia one hundred thousand, San Francisco seventy thousand, New Orleans seventy thousand, Chicago sixty thousand, Denver twenty-five thousand, Pittsburg twenty-five thousand, Baltimore twenty thousand, and there are extensive colonies, often numbering as many as ten thousand, in several other cities.

So vast a foreign-born population is bound to contain elements of both strength and weakness.  The north Italians are molto simpatici to the American character, and many of their national traits are singularly like our own, for they are honest, thrifty, industrious, law-abiding and good-natured.  The Italians from the extreme south of the peninsula have fewer of these qualities, and are apt to be ignorant, lazy, destitute, and superstitious.  A considerable percentage, especially of those from the cities, are criminal.  Even for a long time after landing in America, the Calabrians and Sicilians often exhibit a lack of enlightenment more characteristic of the Middle Ages than of the twentieth century.

At home they have lived in a tumble-down stone hut about fifteen feet square, half open to the sky (its only saving quality); in one corner the entire family sleeping in a promiscuous pile on a bed of leaves; in another a domestic zoo consisting of half a dozen hens, a cock, a goat, and a donkey.  They neither read, think, nor exchange ideas.  The sight of a uniform means to them either a tax-gatherer, a compulsory enlistment in the army, or an arrest, and at its appearance the man will run and the wife and children turn into stone.  They are stubborn and distrustful.  They are the same as they were a thousand or more years gone by.