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People are prone to say cynically, 'Poor man's sins; rich man's diseases. Yet kleptomania does exist, and it is easy to make it seem like crime when it is really persistent, incorrigible, and irrational stealing. Often it is so great as to be incurable. Cases have been recorded of clergymen who were kleptomaniacs and in one instance a dying victim stole the snuffbox of his confessor.
A sort of shaving soap used frequently to be advertised under a title which was as complexly adjusted a piece of mosaic work as the geologists or the conchologists ever turned out. But perhaps the confidence in the protective power of Greek designations lately reached its climax, in an attempt to save thieves from punishment by calling them kleptomaniacs.
That was her pride: she wished not to be even suspected of not facing the music. Lyon had none the less an importunate vision of a veiled figure coming the next day in the dusk to certain places to repair the Colonel's ravages, as the relatives of kleptomaniacs punctually call at the shops that have suffered from their pilferings.
"You've heard of obsessions of men seized every six months with an irresistible desire to drink of kleptomaniacs who, having all they need or wish, must steal or go mad of others driven by inexplicable impulse, mania, to set fire to buildings, for the thrill they get out of seeing the flames burst forth.
Before being in their delectable company an hour they reveal that strange mingling of childlike simplicity and total moral depravity that enters into the composition of semi-civilized kleptomaniacs.
I used to have trouble enough with my number eighteen and lip stick and the bunch of near-lady kleptomaniacs that the manager made a great mistake taking on the road in the last show I was with. Well, to get back to vaudeville, I don't know whether to do a single turn or put on a big act with a dancing scene or a prizefight in it. Those things go big nowadays.
These days I find it incumbent on me to turn washer-woman occasionally, and, halting at the first little stream in this valley, I take upon myself the onerous duties of Wall Lung in Sacramento City, having for an interested and interesting audience two evil-looking kleptomaniacs, buffalo-herders dressed in next to nothing, who eye my garments drying on the bushes with lingering covetousness.
But you get boy kleptomaniacs just as much in proportion as grown-up kleptomaniacs. I knew a man. Had a son. Couldn't keep him away from anything valuable. Had to take him away in a hurry from three schools, good schools, too. 'Really? What became of him? He did not come to us, I suppose? 'No. Somebody advised the father to send him to one of those North-Country schools where they flog.
He appeared fascinated. "See how it works?" she went on. "You see one hundred and twenty-five millimeters is the normal pressure. Kitty Carr is absolutely abnormal. I do not know, but I think that she suffers from periodical attacks of vertigo. Almost all kleptomaniacs do. During an attack they are utterly irresponsible." Drummond was looking at the thing carefully.
It is because nearly all forms of crime known to you are motiveless now, and when they appear can only be explained as the outcropping of ancestral traits. You used to call persons who stole, evidently without any rational motive, kleptomaniacs, and when the case was clear deemed it absurd to punish them as thieves.
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