ABSTRACT
So far, as we have already indicated, the criminal law in most countries has done very little in this respect. It has made no distinction, for instance, between the man who steals my hundredth handkerchief and the man who makes away with my only one—to refer to Margery Fry's “Ancestral Child”, that little masterpiece of wisdom and understanding. 1 Primitive people, in their peculiar ways, sometimes show a different attitude. Among the Eskimos of Bering Strait, “if a man borrows from another and fails to return the article, he is not held to account for it. This is because if a person has enough property to enable nim to lend it, he has more than he needs”. 2 Though the ai^ument hardly holds water outside economic systems of the m£St primitive character, the idea itself is sound that the needs of the parties, the use which the owner has made of the stolen article and the damage inflicted on him should be taken into account. We find it expressed in a few modern Penal Codes: for instance, the Russian Code, art. 162, increases the penalty for theft if the article was known to be essential to the maintenance of the owner, and under the Italian Code, art. 133, the judge has to take into account the gravity of the injury. Cattle stealing, as we have seen, is especially provided for in the law of a number of countries, but only the Russian Code, art. 166, restricts the increased protection to cases where the animal is stolen “from an agricultural or animal-breeding population”.
