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SOCIALISM AND MODERN SCIENCE. 
 
INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY 
 
 Socialism and 
 Modern Science 
 
 (DARWIN—SPENCER—MARX) 
 
 ENRICO FERRI 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 ROBT. RIVES LA MONTE 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 New York 
 
 International Library Publishing Co. 
 
 1904 
 
BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
 Copyright, 1900. 
 
 By The International Library Publishing Co. 
 
 AUG-7'61 
 
 
Uable of Contents. 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 Preface..... 5 
 
 Introduction.... 9 
 
 I. 
 
 THE THREE ALLEGED CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN 
 DARWINISM AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 Virchow and Haeckel at the Congress of Munich. 13 
 
 a) The equality of individuals. 19 
 
 b) The struggle for life and its victims. 35 
 
 c) The survival of the fittest. 49 
 
 SOCIALISM AS A CONSEQUENCE OF DARWINISM. 
 
 Socialism and religious beliefs. 59 
 
 The individual and the species. 67 
 
 The struggle for life and the class-struggle. 74 
 
 II. 
 
 EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 The orthodox thesis and the socialist thesis confronted by 
 
 the theory of evolution. 92 
 
 The law of apparent retrogression and collective ownership 100 
 
 The social evolution and individual liberty. 110 
 
 Evolution.—Revolution.—Rebellion.—Violence. 129 
 
 III. 
 
 SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 Sterility of sociology. 156 
 
 Marx completes Darwin and Spencer. Conservatives and 
 
 socialists. 159 
 
 Appendix I.—Reply to Spencer. 173 
 
 Appendix II.—Socialist superstition and individualist myopia 177 
 
 <s.« 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
Ilntrotmction. 
 
 Convinced Darwinian and Spencerian, as I am, it is 
 my intention to demonstrate that Marxian Socialism— 
 the only socialism which has a truly scientific method 
 and value, and therefore the only socialism which from 
 this time forth has power to inspire and unite the Social 
 Democrats throughout the civilized world—is only the 
 practical and fruitful fulfilment, in the social life, of 
 that modern scientific revolution which—inaugurated 
 some centuries since by the rebirth of the experimental 
 method in all branches of human knowledge—has 
 triumphed in our times, thanks to the works of Charles 
 Darwin and Herbert Spencer. 
 
 It is true that Darwin and especially Spencer halted 
 when they had travelled only half way toward the con¬ 
 clusions of a religious, political or social order, which 
 necessarily flow from their indisputable premises. But 
 that is, as it were, only an ind ividual episode, and has no 
 power to stop the desiiiied, march of science and of its 
 practical consequences, which are in wonderful accord 
 
10 
 
 with the necessities—necessities enforced upon our atten¬ 
 tion by want and misery—of contemporary life. This is 
 simply one more reason why it is incumbent upon us to 
 render justice to the scientific and political work of Karl 
 Marx which completes the renovation of modern scientific 
 thought. 
 
 Feeling and thought are the two.inseparable impelling 
 forces of the individual life and of the collective life. 
 
 Socialism, which was still, but a few years since, at the 
 mercy of the strong and constantly recurring but undis¬ 
 ciplined fluctuations of humanitarian sentimentalism, 
 has found, in the work of that great man, Karl Marx, 
 and of those who have developed and completed his 
 thought, its scientific and political guide . 1 This is the 
 explanation of every one of its conquests. 
 
 Civilization is the most fruitful and most beautiful 
 development of human energies, but it contains also an 
 infectious virus of tremendous power. Beside the 
 splendor of its artistic, scientific and industrial achieve¬ 
 ments, it accumulates gangrenous products, idleness, 
 poverty, misery, insanity, crime and physical suicide and 
 moral suicide, i. e. servility. 
 
 Pessimism—that sad symptom of a life without ideals 
 and, in part, the effect of the exhaustion or even of the 
 degeneration of the nervous system—glorifies the final 
 
 1 The word in the original means a mariner’s compass.— Tr. 
 
11 
 
 annihilation of all life and sensation as the only mode 
 of escaping from or triumphing over pain and suffering. 
 
 We have faith, on the contrary, in the eternal virtiis 
 medicatrix naturae (healing power of Nature), and 
 socialism is precisely that breath of a new and better 
 life which will free humanity—after some access of fever 
 perhaps—from the noxious products of the present phase 
 of civilization, and which, in a more advanced phase, 
 will give a new power and opportunity of expansion to 
 all the healthy and fruitful energies of all human beings. 
 
 Borne, June, 1894. 
 
 J jQ? 
 
 Enrico Ferri. 
 
 
 r 
 
 / / / 
 
 
 
 A 
 
 / 
 
 
 
Socialism and Modern Science. 
 
 PART FIRST. 
 
 I. 
 
 VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS OF MUNICH. 
 
 On the 18th of September, 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the 
 celebrated embryologist of Jena, delivered at the 
 Congress of Naturalists, which was held at Munich, an 
 eloquent address defending and propagating Darwinism, 
 which was at that time the object of the most bitter 
 polemical attacks. 
 
 A few days afterward, Virchow, the great pathologist, 
 —an active member of the “progressive” parliamentary 
 party, hating new theories in politics just as much as in 
 science—violently assailed the Darwinian theory of 
 organic evolution, and, moved by a very just presenti¬ 
 ment, hurled against it this cry of alarm, this political 
 anathema: “Darwinism leads directly to socialism.” 
 
 The German Darwinians, and at their head Messrs. 
 Oscar Schmidt and Haeckel, immediately protested; and. 
 
- 
 
 . ' 
 
 
 — 14 — 
 
 in order to avert the addition of strong political opposi¬ 
 tion to the religious, philosophical, and biological opposi¬ 
 tion already made to Darwinism, they maintained, on 
 the contrary, that the Darwinian theory is in direct, open 
 and absolute opposition to socialism. 
 
 “If the Socialists were prudent,” wrote Oscar Schmidt 
 in the “Ausland” of November 27, 1877, “they would do 
 their utmost to kill, by silent neglect, the theory of 
 descent, for that theory most emphatically proclaims 
 that the socialist ideas are impracticable.” 
 
 “As a matter of fact,” said Haeckel, 1 “there is no 
 scientific doctrine which proclaims more openly than the 
 theory of descent that the equality of individuals, toward 
 which socialism tends, is an impossibility; that this chim¬ 
 erical equality is in absolute contradiction with the 
 necessary and, in fact, universal inequality of individuals. 
 
 “Socialism demands for all citizens equal rights, equal 
 duties, equal possessions and equal enjoyments; the 
 theory of descent establishes, on the contrary, that the 
 realization of these hopes is purely and simply impos¬ 
 sible; that, in human societies, as in animal societies, 
 neither the rights, nor the duties, nor the possessions, 
 nor the enjoyments of all the members of a society are 
 or ever can be equal. 
 
 “The great law of variation teaches—both in the gen¬ 
 eral theory of evolution and in the smaller field of 
 biology where it becomes the theory of descent—that 
 the variety of phenomena flows from an original unity, 
 
 1 Les preuves du transformisme.—Paris, 1879, page 110 
 et seq. 
 
the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and 
 the complexity of organization from a primordial sim¬ 
 plicity. The conditions of existence for all individuals 
 are, from their very birth, unequal. There must also be 
 taken into consideration the inherited qualities and the 
 innate tendencies which also vary more or less 
 widely. In view of all this, how can the work and the 
 reward be equal for all? 
 
 “The more highly the social life is developed, the 
 more important becomes the great principle of the divi¬ 
 sion of labor, the more requisite it becomes for the 
 stable existence of the State as a whole that its members 
 should distribute among themselves the multifarious 
 tasks of life, each performing a single function; and as 
 the labor which must be performed by the individuals, 
 as well as the expenditure of strength, talent, money, etc., 
 which it necessitates, differs more and more, it is natural 
 that the remuneration of this labor should also vary 
 widely. These are facts so simple and so obvious that it 
 seems to me every intelligent and enlightened statesman 
 ought to be an advocate of the theory of descent and the 
 general doctrine of evolution, as the best antidote for the 
 absurd equalitarian, utopian notions of the socialists. 
 
 “And it was Darwinism, the theory of selection, that 
 Virchow, in his denunciation, had in mind, rather than 
 mere metamorphic development, the theory of descent, 
 with which it is always confused! Darwinism is any¬ 
 thing rather than socialistic. 
 
 “If one wishes to attribute a political tendency to this 
 English theory,—which is quite permissible,—this 
 
16 
 
 tendency can be nothing but aristocratic; by no means 
 can it be democratic, still less socialistic. 
 
 “The theory of selection teaches that in the life of 
 mankind, as in that of plants and animals, it is always 
 and everywhere a small privileged minority alone which 
 succeeds in living and developing itself; the immense 
 majority, on the contrary, suffer and succumb more or 
 less prematurely. Countless are the seeds and eggs of 
 every species of plants and animals, and the young indi¬ 
 viduals who issue from them. But the number of those 
 who have the good fortune to reach fully developed 
 maturity and to attain the goal of their existence is 
 relatively insignificant. 
 
 “The cruel and pitiless ‘struggle for existence’ which 
 rages everywhere throughout animated nature, and which 
 in the nature of things must rage, this eternal and inex¬ 
 orable competition between all living beings, is an 
 undeniable fact. Only a small picked number of the 
 strongest or fittest is able to come forth victoriously from 
 .this battle of competition. The great majority of their 
 unfortunate competitors are inevitably destined to perish. 
 It is well enough to deplore this tragic fatality, but one 
 cannot deny it or change it. ‘Many are called, but few 
 are chosen!’ 
 
 V*- .. . 
 
 “The selection, the ‘election’ of these ‘elect’ is by abso¬ 
 lute necessity bound up with the rejection or destruc¬ 
 tion of the vast multitude of beings whom they have 
 survived. And so another learned Englishman has 
 called the fundamental principle of Darwinism ‘the sur¬ 
 vival of the fittest, the victory of the best.’ 
 
 At all events, the principle of selection is not in the 
 
Z / 
 
 & & 
 
 
 
 
 — 17 — 
 
 slightest degree democratic; it is, on the contrary, 
 thoroughly aristocratic. If, then, Darwinism, carried 
 out to its ultimate logical consequences, has, according 
 to Virchow, for the statesman ‘an extraordinarily danger¬ 
 ous side/ the danger is doubtless that it favors aristocratic 
 aspirations.” 
 
 I have reproduced complete and in their exact form 
 all the arguments of Haeckel, because they are those 
 which are repeated—in varying tones, and with expres¬ 
 sions which differ from his only to lose precision and 
 eloquence—by those opponents of socialism who love to 
 appear scientific, and who, for polemical convenience, 
 make use of those ready-made or stereotyped phrases 
 which have currency, even in science, more than is com¬ 
 monly imagined. 
 
 It is easy, nevertheless, to demonstrate that, in this 
 debate^ Virchow’s way of looking at the subject was the 
 
 more correct and more perspicacious, and that the history 
 
 /N 
 
 of these last twenty years has amply justified his position. ^ ^ 
 
 It has happened, indeed, that Darwinism and socialism 
 have both progressed with a marvelous power of expan¬ 
 sion. From that time the one was to conquer—for its 
 fundamental theory—the unanimous endorsement of 
 naturalists; the other was to continue to develop—in its 
 general aspirations as in its political discipline—flooding 
 all the conduits of the social consciousness, like a 
 torrential inundation from internal wounds caused by the 
 daily growth of physical and moral disease, or like a 
 gradual, capillary, inevitable infiltration into minds freed 
 from all prejudices, and which are not satisfied by the 
 
 
merely personal advantages that they derive from the 
 orthodox distribution of spoils. 
 
 But, as political or scientific theories are natural 
 phenomena and not the capricious and ephemeral prod¬ 
 ucts of the free wills of those who construct and 
 propagate them, it is evident that if these two currents of 
 modern thought have each been able to triumph over the 
 opposition they first aroused—the strongest kind of oppo¬ 
 sition, scientific and political conservatism—and if every 
 day increases the army of their avowed disciples, this of 
 itself is enough to show us—I was about to say by a law 
 of intellectual symbiosis —that they are neither irrecon¬ 
 cilable with, nor contradictory to, each other. 
 
 Moreover, the three principal arguments which form 
 the substance of the anti-socialist reasoning of Haeckel 
 resist neither the most elementary criticisms, nor the 
 most superficial observation of every-day life. 
 
 These arguments are: 
 
 I. —Socialism tends toward a chimerical equality of 
 persons and property: Darwinism, on the contrary, not 
 only establishes, but shows the organic necessity of the 
 natural inequality of the capabilities and even the wants 
 of individuals. 
 
 II. —In the life of mankind, as in that of plants and 
 animals, the immense majority of those who are born are 
 destined to perish, because only a small minority can 
 triumph in the “struggle for existence”; socialism asserts, 
 on the contrary, that all ought to triumph in this strug¬ 
 gle, and that no one is inexorably destined to be con¬ 
 quered. 
 
 III. —The struggle for existence assures “the survival 
 
of the best, the victory of the fittest,” and this results in 
 an aristocratic hierarchic gradation of selected indi¬ 
 viduals—a continuous progress—instead of the demo¬ 
 cratic, collectivist leveling of socialism. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS. 
 
 The first of the objections, which is brought against 
 socialism in the name of Darwinism, is absolutely without 
 foundation. 
 
 If it were true that socialism aspires to “the equality 
 of all individuals,” it would be correct to assert that 
 Darwinism irrevocably condemns it. 1 
 
 But although even to-day it is still currently repeated 
 —by some in good faith, like parrots who recite their 
 stereotyped phrases; by others in bad faith, with polemi¬ 
 cal skillfulness—that socialism is synonymous with 
 equality and leveling; the truth is, on the contrary, that 
 scientific socialism—the socialism which draws its in¬ 
 spiration from the theory of Marx, and which alone 
 to-day is worthy of support or opposition,—has never 
 denied the inequality of individuals, as of all living 
 
 1 J. De Johannis, II concetto delVequaglianza nel socialismo 
 e nella scienza, in Rassegna delle scienza sociali, Florence, 
 March 15, 1883, and more recently, Huxley, “On the Natural 
 Inequality of Men,” in the “Nineteenth Century,” January, 
 
 1890. 
 
20 
 
 
 beings—inequality innate and acquired, physical and 
 intellectual. 1 
 
 It is just as if one should say that socialism asserts that 
 a royal deoree or a popular vote could settle it that 
 “henceforth all men shall be five feet seven inches tall.” 
 
 But in truth, socialism is something more serious and 
 more difficult to refute. 
 
 Socialism says: Men are unequal , but they are all (of 
 them) men. 
 
 And, in fact, although each individual is born and 
 
 ^ 1 Utopian socialism has bequeathed to us as a mental habit, 
 / a habit surviving even in the most intelligent disciples of 
 Marxian socialism, of asserting the existence of certain 
 f equalities—the equality of the two sexes, for example— asser¬ 
 tions which cannot possibly be maintained. 
 
 Bebel, Woman in the Past , Present and Future. 
 
 Bebel, the propagandist and expounder of Marxian theories, 
 also repeats this assertion that, from the psycho-physiologi¬ 
 cal point of view, woman is the equal of man, and he 
 attempts to refute, without success, the scientific objections 
 that have been made to this thesis. 
 
 Since the scientific investigations of Messrs. Lombroso 
 and Ferrero, embodied in Donna delinquente, prostituta e nor - 
 male, Turin, 1893 (This book has been translated into Eng¬ 
 lish, if my memory serves me right.—Tr.), one can no longer 
 deny the physiological and psychological inferiority of 
 woman to man. I have given a Darwinian explanation of 
 this fact ( Scuola positiva, 1893, Nos. 7-8), that Lombroso 
 has since completely accepted ( Uomo di genio, 6e 6dit., 1894. 
 This book is also available in English, I believe.—Tr.) I 
 pointed out that all the physio-psychical characteristics of 
 woman are the consequences of her great biological function, 
 maternity. 
 
 A being who creates another being—not in the fleeting 
 
I 
 
 develops in a fashion more or less different from that of 
 
 all other individuals,—just as there are not in a forest 
 
 two leaves identically alike, so in the whole world there 
 
 are not two men in all respects equals, the one of the 
 
 other,—nevertheless every man, simply because he is a **•/ v 
 
 human being , has a right to the existence of a man, and /J ’ : , 4r ^ Ui 
 
 not of a slave or a beast of burden. 
 
 We know, we as well as our opponents, that all men M *•' ’ ' * 
 cannot perform the same kind and amount of labor— 
 now, when social inequalities are added to equalities of 
 natural origin—and that they will still be unable to do 
 
 moment of a voluptuous contact, but by the organic and 
 psychical sacrifices of pregnancy, childbirth and giving suck 
 —cannot preserve for herself as much strength, physical and 4 
 mental, as man whose only function in the reproduction 
 of the species is infinitely less of a drain. 
 
 And so, aside from certain individual exceptions, woman 
 has a lower degree of physical sensibility than man (the 
 current opinion is just the opposite), because if her sensi¬ 
 bility were greater, she could not, according to the Darwin¬ 
 ian law, survive the immense and repeated, sacrifices of 
 maternity, and the species would become extinct. Woman’s 
 intellect is weaker, especially in synthetic power, precisely 
 because though there are no (Sergi, in Atti della societa 
 romana di antropologia, 1894) women of genius, they never¬ 
 theless give birth to men of genius. 
 
 This is so true that greater sensibility and power of 
 intellect are found in women in whom the function and 
 sentiment of maternity are undeveloped or are only slightly 
 developed (women of genius generally have a masculine 
 physiognomy), and many of them attain their complete 
 intellectual development only after they pass the critical 
 period of life during which the maternal functions cease 
 finally. ~ ~ — • * --—— - .—— — 
 
it under a socialist regime—when the social organization 
 will tend to reduce the effect of congenital inequalities. 
 
 There will always be some people whose brains or 
 muscular systems will be better adapted for scientific 
 work or for artistic work, while others will be more fit 
 for manual labor, or for work requiring mechanical pre¬ 
 cision, etc. 
 
 What ought not to be, and what will not be—is that 
 there should be some men who do not work at all, and 
 others who work too much or receive too little reward 
 for their toil. 
 
 But, if it is scientifically certain that woman represents 
 an inferior degree of biological evolution, and that she 
 occupies a station, even as regards her physio-psychical 
 characteristics, midway between the child and the adult 
 male, it does not follow from this that the socialist con¬ 
 clusions concerning the woman question are false. 
 
 Quite the contrary. Society ought to place woman, as 
 a human being and as a creatress of men—more worthy 
 therefore of love and respect—in a better juridical and 
 ethical situation than she enjoys at present. Now she is 
 too often a beast of burden or an object of luxury. In 
 the same way when, from the economic point of view, we 
 demand at the present day special measures in behalf of 
 women, we simply take into consideration their special 
 physio-psychical conditions. The present economic indi¬ 
 vidualism exhausts them in factories and rice-fields; social¬ 
 ism, on the contrary, will require from them only such 
 professional, scientific or muscular labor as is in perfect 
 harmony with the sacred function of maternity. 
 
 Kuliscioff, II monopolio delVuomo, Milan, 1892, 2d edition. 
 
 —Mozzoni, I socialisti e Vemancipazione della donna, Milan, 
 1891. 
 
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 But we have reached the height of injustice and 
 absurdity, and in these days it is the man who does not 
 work who reaps the largest returns, who is thus guar¬ 
 anteed the individual monopoly of wealth which accumu¬ 
 lates by means of hereditary transmission. This wealth, 
 moreover, is only very rarely due to the economy and 
 abstinence of the present possessor or of some industrious 
 _ ancestor of his; it is most frequently the time-honored 
 fruit of spoliation by military conquest, by unscrupulous 
 “business” methods, or by the favoritism of sovereigns; 
 but it is in every instance always independent of any 
 exertion, of any socially useful labor of the inheritor, 
 who often squanders his property in idleness or in the 
 ■whirlpool of a life as inane as it is brilliant in appearance. 
 
 And, when we are not confronted with a fortune due 
 to inheritance, we meet with wealth due to fraud.. With¬ 
 out talking for the moment of the economic organization, 
 the mechanism of which Karl Marx has revealed to us, 
 and which, even without fraud, normally enables the 
 capitalist or property owner to live upon his income 
 without working, it is indisputable that the fortunes 
 which are formed or enlarged with the greatest rapidity 
 under our eyes cannot be the fruit of honest toil. The 
 really honest workingman, no matter how indefatigable 
 and economical he may be, if he succeeds in raising him¬ 
 self from the state of wage-slave to that of an overseer 
 or contractor, can, by a long life of privations, accumu¬ 
 late at most a few hundreds of dollars. Those who, on 
 the contrary, without making by their own talent indus¬ 
 trial discoveries or inventions, accumulate in a few years 
 millions, can be nothing but unscrupulous manipulators 
 
 
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of affairs, if we except a few rare strokes of good luck. 
 And it is these very parasites—bankers, etc.,—who live 
 in the most ostentatious luxury enjoying public honors, 
 and holding offices of trust, as a reward for their honor¬ 
 able business methods. 
 
 Those who toil, the immense majority, receive barely 
 enough food to keep them from dying of hunger; they 
 live in back-rooms, in garrets, in the filthy alleys of 
 cities, or in the country in hovels not fit for stables for 
 horses or cattle. 
 
 Besides all this, we must not forget the horrors of 
 being unable to find work, the saddest and most frequent 
 of the three symptoms of that equality in misery which 
 is spreading like a pestilence over the economic world of 
 modern Italy, as indeed, with varying degrees of inten¬ 
 sity, it is everywhere else. 
 
 I refer to the ever-growing army of the unemployed in 
 agriculture and industry—of those who have lost their 
 foothold in the lower middle class,—and of those who 
 have been expropriated (robbed) of their little possessions 
 by taxes, debts or usury. 
 
 It is not correct, then, to assert that socialism demands 
 for all citizens material and actual equality of labor and 
 rewards. ** 
 
 The only possible equality is equality of obligation to 
 work in order to live, with a guarantee to every laborer 
 of conditions of existence worthy of a human being in 
 exchange for the labor furnished to society. 
 
 Equality, according to socialism—as Benoit Malon 
 
 
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 25 
 
 said 1 —is a relative thing, and must be understood in a 
 
 two-fold sense: 1st, All men, as men, must be guaranteed 
 
 human conditions of existence; 2d, All men ought to be 
 equal at the starting point , ought not to he handicapped, 
 in the struggle for life, in order that each may freely 
 develop his own personality in an environment of equality 
 of social conditions, while to-day a child, sound and 
 healthy, but poor, goes to the wall in competition with a 
 child puny but rich. 2 
 
 This is what constitutes the radical, immeasurable 
 transformation that socialism demands, hut that it also 
 has discovered and announces as an evolution—already 
 begun in the world around us—that will be necessarily, 
 inevitably accomplished in the human society of the days 
 to come. 3 
 
 This transformation is summed up in the conversion 
 of private or individual ownership of the means of pro¬ 
 duction, i. e. of the physical foundation of human life 
 (land, mines, houses, factories, machinery, instruments 
 of labor or tools, and means of transportation) into col¬ 
 lective or social ownership, by means of methods and 
 processes which I will consider further on. 
 
 From this point we will consider it as proven that the- 
 first objection of the anti-socialist reasoning does not 
 hold, since its starting-point is non-existent. It assumes, 
 in short, that contemporary socialism aims at a chimeri¬ 
 cal physical and mental equality of all men, when the 
 
 1 B. Malon, Le Socialisme Integral, 2 vol., Paris, 1892. 
 
 2 Zultaxi, II privilegio della salute, Milan, 1893. 
 
 8 Letourneau, Pass6, present et avenir du travail, in Revue 
 memuelle de VCcole d'anthropologic, Paris, June 15, 1894. 
 
fact is that scientific and fact-founded socialism never, 
 even in a dream, thought of such a thing. 
 
 Socialism maintains, on the contrary, that this inequal¬ 
 ity'—though greatly diminished under a better social 
 organization which will do away with all the physical and 
 mental imperfections that are the cumulative results of 
 generations of poverty and misery—can, nevertheless, 
 never disappear for the reasons that Darwinism has dis¬ 
 covered in the mysterious mechanism of life, in other 
 words on account of the principle of variation that 
 manifests itself in the continuous development of species 
 culminating in man. 
 
 In every social organization that it is possible to con- 
 ceive, there will always be some men large and others 
 small, some weak and some strong, some phlegmatic and 
 some nervous, some more intelligent, others less so, some 
 superior in mental power, others in muscular strength; 
 and it is well that it should be so; moreover, it is in¬ 
 evitable. £*&**-$ ^ 
 
 It is well that this is so, because the variety and in¬ 
 equality of individual aptitudes naturally produce that 
 division of labor that Darwinism has rightly declared to 
 be a law of individual physiology and of social economy. 
 
 All men ought to work in order to live, but each ought 
 to devote himself to the kind of labor which best suits 
 his peculiar aptitudes. An injurious waste of strength 
 and abilities would thus be avoided, and labor would 
 cease to be repugnant/and would become agreeable arid 
 necessary as a condition of physical and moral health. 
 
 And when all have given to society the labor best suited 
 \ to their innate and acquired aptitudes, each has a right 
 
27 
 
 to the same rewards, since each has equally contributed - 
 to that solidarity of labor which sustains the life of the 
 social aggregate and, in solidarity with it, the life of each 
 individual. 
 
 The peasant who digs the earth performs a kind of 
 labor in appearance more modest, but just as necessary, 
 useful and meritorious as that of the workman who 
 builds a locomotive, of the mechanical engineer who im¬ 
 proves it or of the savant who strives to extend the bounds 
 of human knowledge in his study or laboratory. 
 
 The one essential thing is that all the members of 
 society work, just as in the individual organism all the 
 cells perform their different functions, more or less 
 modest in appearance—for example, the nerve-cells, the 
 bone-cells or the muscular cells—but all biological func¬ 
 tions, or sorts of labor, equally useful and necessary to 
 the life of the organism as a whole. 
 
 In the biological organism no living cell remains 
 inactive, and the cell obtains nourishment by material 
 exchanges only in proportion to its labor; in the social 
 organism no individual ought to live without working, 
 whatever form his labor may take. 
 
 In this way the majority of the artificial difficulties 
 that our opponents raise against socialism may be swept 
 aside. 
 
 “Who, then, will black the boots under the socialist 
 regime?” demands M. Richter in his book so poor in 
 ideas, but which becomes positively grotesque when it 
 assumes that, in the name of social equality the “grand 
 chancellor” of the socialist society will be obliged, before 
 attending to the public business, to black his own boots 
 
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 and mind his own clothes! In truth, if the adversaries 
 of socialism had nothing but arguments of this sort, dis¬ 
 cussion would indeed be needless. 
 
 But all will want to do the least fatiguing and most 
 agreeable kinds of work, says some one with a greater 
 show of seriousness. 
 
 I will answer that this is equivalent to demanding 
 to-day the promulgation of a decree as follows: Hence¬ 
 forth all men shall be born painters or surgeons! 
 
 The distribution to the proper persons of the different 
 kinds of mental and manual labor will be effected in 
 fact by the anthropological variations in temperament 
 and character, and there will be no need to resort to 
 monkish regulations (another baseless objection to 
 socialism). 
 
 Propose to a peasant of average intelligence to devote 
 himself to the study of anatomy or of the penal code or, 
 inversely, tell him whose brain is more highly developed 
 than his muscles to dig the earth, instead of observing 
 .with the microscope. They will each pre fer the lab 
 for which they feel themselves~best fitted. 
 
 1,1 "" 111 “—^"r i orn^.tnmri.e 
 
 'he changes of occupation or profession will not be 
 as considerable as many imagine when society shall' be 
 organized under the collectivist regime. When once the 
 industries ministering to purely personal luxury shall b 
 suppressed—luxury which in most cases insults a 
 aggravates the misery of the masses—the quantity ajid 
 variety of work will adapt themselves gradually, that is 
 to say naturally, to the socialist phase of civilization/just 
 as they now conform to the bourgeois phase. 
 
 Moreover, under the socialist regime, every one will 
 
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 — 29 — 
 
 have the fullest liberty to declare and make manifest his 
 personal aptitudes, and it will not happen, as it does 
 to-day, that many peasants, sons of the people and of 
 the lower middle class, gifted with natural talents, 
 will be compelled to allow their talents to atrophy while 
 they toil as peasants, workingmen or employees, when 
 they would be able to furnish society a different and 
 more fruitful kind of labor, because it would be more in 
 harmony with their peculiar genius. 
 
 The one essential point is this: In exchange for the 
 labor that they furnish to society, society must guarantee 
 to the peasant and the artisan, as well as to the one who 
 devotes himself to the liberal careers, conditions of exist¬ 
 ence worthy of a human being. Then we will no longer 
 be affronted by the spectacle of a ballet girl, for instance, 
 earning as much in one evening by whirling on her toes 
 as a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, etc., in a year’s work. 
 In fact to-day the latter are in luck if they do that well. 
 
 Certainly, the arts will not be neglected under the 
 socialist regime, because socialism wishes life to be agree¬ 
 able for all, instead of for a privileged few only, as it 
 is to-day; it will, on the contrary, give to all the arts 
 a marvelous impulse, and if it abolishes private luxury 
 this will be all the more favorable to the splendor of the 
 public edifices. 
 
 More attention will be paid to^assuring to each one 
 remuneration in proportion to the labor performed. This 
 ratio will be ascertained by taking the difficulty and 
 danger of the labor into account and allowing them 
 to reduce the time required for a given compensation. 
 If a peasant in the open air can work seven or eight 
 
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 •it-'* • 
 
 
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 CL 
 
 ,A<.. 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 ; /: 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
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 d 
 
 
 
 i:— 
 
 vy 
 
 
 — 30 — 
 
 hours a day, a miner ought not to work more than three 
 or four hours. And, indeed, when everybody shall 
 work, when much unproductive labor shall be suppressed, 
 the aggregate of daily labor to be distributed among men 
 will be much less heavy and more easily endured (by 
 reason of the more abundant food, more comfortable 
 lodging and recreation guaranteed to every worker) than 
 it is to-day by those who toil and who are so poorly paid, 
 and, besides this, the progress of science applied to 
 industry will render human labor less and less toilsome. 
 
 Individuals will apply themselves to work, although 
 the wages or remuneration cannot be accumulated as 
 private wealth, because if the normal, healthy, well-fed 
 man avoids excessive or poorly rewarded labor, he does 
 not remain in idleness, since it is a physiological and 
 psychological necessity for him to devote himself to a 
 daily occupation in harmony with his capacities. 
 
 The different kinds of sport are for the leisure classes 
 a substitute for productive labor which a physiological 
 necessity imposes upon them, in order that they may 
 escape the detrimental consequences of absolute repose 
 and ennui. 
 
 The gravest problem will be to proportion the re¬ 
 muneration to the labor of each. You know that col¬ 
 lectivism adopts the formula—to jach according to his 
 labor, while communism adopts this other—to each 
 according to his needs. 
 
 No one can give, in its practical details , the solution 
 of this problem; but this impossibility of predicting 
 the future even in its slightest details does not justify 
 those who brand socialism as a utopia incapable of 
 
31 
 
 realization. INTo one could have, a priori, in the dawn 
 of any civilization predicted its successive developments, 
 as I will demonstrate when I come to speak of the 
 methods of social renovation. 
 
 This is what we are able to affirm with assurance, 
 basing our position on the most certain inductions of 
 psychology and sociology. 
 
 It cannot be denied, as Marx himself declared, that 
 this second formula—which makes it possible to distin¬ 
 guish, according to some, anarchy from socialism—rep¬ 
 resents a more remote and more complex ideal. But it 
 is equally impossible to deny that, in any case, the 
 formula of collectivism represents a phase of social evolu¬ 
 tion, a period of individual discipline which must neces¬ 
 sarily precede communism. 1 
 
 There is no need to believe that socialism will realize 
 in their fulness all the highest possible ideals of humanity 
 and that after its advent there will be nothing left to 
 desire or to battle for! Our descendants would be con¬ 
 demned to idleness and vagabondage if our immediate 
 ideal was so perfect and all-inclusive as to leave them 
 no ideal at which to aim. 
 
 1 M. Zerboglio has very justly pointed out that individual¬ 
 ism acting without the pressure of external sanction and by 
 the simple internal impulse toward good (rightness)—this is 
 the distant ideal of Herbert Spencer—can be realized only 
 after a phase of collectivism, during which the individual 
 activity and instincts can be disciplined into social solidarity 
 and weaned from the essentially anarchist individualism of 
 our times when every one, if he is clever enough to “slip 
 through the meshes of the penal code” can do what he 
 pleases without any regard to his fellows. 
 
 ■tw-"' -- -C 
 
32 
 
 The individual or the society which no longer has an 
 ideal to strive toward is dead or about to die. 1 The 
 formula of communism may then be a more remote ideal, 
 when collectivism shall have been completely realized by 
 the historical processes which I will consider further on. 
 
 We are now in a position to conclude that there is no 
 contradiction between socialism and Darwinism on the 
 subject of the equality of all men. Socialism has never 
 laid down this proposition and like Darwinism its tend¬ 
 ency is toward a better life for individuals and for 
 society. 
 
 This enables us also to reply to this objection, too 
 often repeated, that socialism stifles and suppresses 
 human individuality under the leaden pall of collectivism, 
 by subjecting individuals to uniform monastic regula¬ 
 tions and by making them into so many human bees in 
 the social honey-comb. 
 
 Exactly the opposite of this is true. Is it not obvious 
 that it is under the present bourgeois organization of 
 society that so many individualities atrophy and are lost 
 to humanity, which under other conditions might be 
 developed to their own advantage and to the advantage 
 of society as a whole? To-day, in fact, apart from some 
 rare exceptions, every man is valued for what he possesses 
 and not for what he is. 2 
 
 He who is born poor, obviously by no fault of his 
 own, may be endowed by Nature with artistic or scien- 
 
 1 “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” is the 
 way Robert Browning expresses this in “Andrea Del Sarto.” 
 —Translator. 
 
 2 Note our common expression: He is worth so much.—Tr. 
 
33 
 
 tific genius, but if his patrimony is insufficient to enable 
 him to triumph in the first struggles for development 
 and to complete his education, or if he has not, like 
 the shepherd Giotto, the luck to meet with a rich 
 Cimabue, he must inevitably vanish in oblivion in the 
 great prison of wage-slavery, and society itself thus loses 
 treasures of intellectual pfrrrrr 1 , 
 
 He who is born rich, although he owes his fortune to 
 no personal exertion, even if his mental capacity is 
 below normal, will play a leading role on the stage of 
 life's theatre, and all servile people will heap praise 
 and flattery upon him, and he will imagine, simply 
 because he has money, that he is quite a different person 
 from what in reality he is. 2 
 
 1 “Full many a gem of purest ray serene 
 The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear; 
 
 Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 
 
 And waste its fragrance on the desert air. 
 
 “Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast 
 The little tyrant of his fields withstood. 
 
 Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, 
 
 Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.” 
 
 —Stanzas from Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Church-yard.” 
 
 Translator. 
 
 2 “Cursed be the gold that gilds the straighten’d forehead of 
 the fool!” 
 
 —Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall.” 
 
 “Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold! 
 
 Thus, much of this will make black, white; foul, fair; 
 
 Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.” 
 
 —Shakespeare, in “Timon of Athens.”—Translator. 
 
When property shall have become collective, that is 
 to say, under the socialist regime, every one will be 
 assured of the means of existence, and the daily labor 
 will simply serve to give free play to the special apti¬ 
 tudes, more or less original, of each individual, and the 
 best and most fruitful (potentially) years of life will 
 not be completely taken up, as they are at present, by 
 the grievous and tragic battle for daily bread. 
 
 Socialism will assure to every one a human life; it 
 will give each individual true liberty to manifest and 
 develop his or her own physical and intellectual indi¬ 
 viduality—individualities which they bring into the 
 world at birth and which are infinitely varied and 
 unequal. Socialism does not deny inequality; it merely 
 wishes to utilize this inequality as one of the factors 
 leading to the free, prolific and many-sided development 
 of human life. 
 
35 
 
 III. 
 
 THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AND ITS VICTIMS. 
 
 Socialism and Darwinism, it is said, are in conflict 
 on a second point. Darwinism demonstrates that the 
 immense majority—of plants, animals and men—are 
 destined to succumb, because only a small minority 
 triumphs “in the struggle for life”; socialism, on its 
 part, asserts that all ought to triumph and that no one 
 ought to succumb. —— 
 
 It may be replied, in the first place, that, even in the 
 biological domain of the “struggle for existence,” the 
 disproportion between the number of individuals who are 
 born and the number of those who survive regularly and 
 progressively grows smaller and smaller as we ascend in 
 the biological scale from vegetables to animals, and from 
 animals to Man. 
 
 This law of a decreasing disproportion between the 
 “called” and the “chosen” is supported by the facts even 
 if we limit our observation to the various species belong¬ 
 ing to the same natural order. The higher and more 
 complex the organization, the smaller the disproportion. 
 
 In fact, in the vegetables, each individual produces 
 every year an infinite number 6f seeds, and an infinitesi¬ 
 mal number of these survive. In the animals, the num¬ 
 ber of young of each individual diminishes and the 
 number of those who survive continues, on the con- 
 
36 
 
 trary, to increase. Finally, for the human species, the 
 number of individuals that each one can beget is very 
 small and most of them survive. 
 
 But, moreover, in the cases of all three, vegetables, 
 animals and men, we find that it is the lower and more 
 simply organized species, the races and classes less 
 advanced in the scale of existence, who reproduce their 
 several kinds with the greatest prolificness and in which 
 generation follows generation most rapidly on account 
 of the brevity of individual life. 
 
 A fern produces millions of spores, and its life is very 
 short—while a palm tree produces only a few dozen 
 seeds, and lives a century. 
 
 A fish produces several thousand eggs—while the 
 elephant or the chimpanzee have only a few young who 
 live many years. 
 
 Within the human species the savage races are the 
 most prolific and their lives are short—while the civilized 
 races have a low birth-rate and live longer. 
 
 From all this it follows that, even confining ourselves 
 to the purely biological domain, the number of victors 
 in the struggle for existence constantly tends to approach 
 nearer and nearer to the number of births with the 
 advance or ascent in the biological scale from vegetables 
 to animals, from animals to men, and from the lower 
 species or varieties to the higher species or varieties. 
 
 The iron law of “the struggle for existence,” then, 
 constantly reduces the number of the victims forming 
 its hecatomb with the ascent of the biological scale, and 
 the rate of decrease becomes more and more rapid as 
 the forms of life become more complex and more perfect. 
 
37 
 
 
 L 
 
 x 
 
 0- 
 
 It would then be a mistake to invoke against socialism 
 the Darwinian law of Natural Selection in the form 
 under which that law manifests itself in the primitive 
 (or lower) forms of life, without taking into account its 
 continuous attenuation as we pass from vegetables to ani¬ 
 mals, from animals to men, and within humanity itself, 
 from the primitive races to the more advanced races. 
 
 (And as socialism represents a yet more advanced phase 
 of human progress, it is still less allowable to use as an 
 objection to it such a gross and inaccurate interpretation :> v - 
 of the Darwinian law^ \ & 
 
 It is certain that the opponents of socialism have made 
 a wrong use of the Darwinian law or rather of its “brutal” 
 interpretation in order to justify modern individualist 
 competition which is too often only a disguised form 
 of cannibalism, and which has made the maxim homo 
 homini lupus (man to man a wolf; or, freely, “man eats 
 man”) the characteristic motto of our era, while Hobbes 
 only made it the ruling principle of the “state of nature 
 of mankind, before the making of the “social contract. 
 
 But because a principle has been abused or misused 
 we are not justified in concluding that the principle 
 itself is false. Its abuse often serves as an incentive 
 to define its nature and its limitations more accurately, 
 so that in practice it may be applied more correctly. This 
 will be the result of my demonstration of the perfect 
 harmony that reigns between socialism and Darwinism. 
 
 As long ago as thedirst edition of my work Socialismo 
 e Criminalita (pages 179 et seq.) I maintained that the 
 struggle for existence is a law immanent in the human 
 race, as it is a law of all living beings, although its 
 
 \ K 
 
 
 
 
 
 
/ 
 
 / 
 
 I 
 
 
 ♦ 
 
 forms continually change and though it undergoes more 
 and more attenuation. 
 
 This is still the way it appears to me, and consequently, 
 on this point I disagree with some socialists who have 
 thought they could triumph more completely over the 
 objection urged against them in the name of Darwinism 
 by declaring that in human society the “struggle for 
 existence” is a law which is destined to lose all meaning 
 and applicability when the social transformation at which 
 socialism aims shall have been effected. 1 
 
 It is a law which dominates tyrannically all living 
 beings, and it must cease to act and fall inert at the 
 feet of Man, as if he were*h$% merely a link inseparable 
 | from the great biological chainl % 
 
 I maintained, and I still maintain, that the struggle 
 for existence is a law inseparable from life, and conse¬ 
 quently from humanity itself, but that, though remain¬ 
 ing an inherent and constant law, it is gradually trans¬ 
 formed in its essence and attenuated in its forms. 
 
 Among primitive mankind the struggle for existence 
 is but slightly differentiated from that which obtains 
 among the other animals. It is the brutal struggle for 
 daily food or for possession of the females—hunger and 
 love are, in fact, the two fundamental needs and the 
 two poles of life—and almost its only method is muscular 
 violence. In a more advanced phase there is joined to 
 this basic struggle the struggle for political supremacy 
 (in the clan, in the tribe, in the village, in the commune, 
 
 1 Such socialists are 
 COLAJANNI. 
 
39 
 
 in the State), and, more and more, muscular struggle 
 is superseded by intellectual struggle. 
 
 (in the historical period the Graeco-Latin society 
 struggled for civil equality (the abolition of slavery); it 
 triumphed, but it did not halt, because to live is to 
 struggle; the society of the middle ages struggled for 
 religious equality; it won the battle, but it did not halt; 
 and at the end of the last century, it struggled for 
 political equality. Must it now halt and remain stationary 
 in the present state of progress? To-day society struggles 
 for economic equality, not for an absolute material 
 equality, but for that more practical, truer equality of 
 which I have already spoken. And all the evidence 
 enables us to foresee with mathematical certainty that 
 this victory will be won to give place to new struggles 
 and to new ideals among our descendants^ 
 
 The successive changes in the subject-matter (or the 
 ideals) of the struggles for existence are accompanied 
 by a progressive mitigation of the methods of combat. 
 Violent and muscular at first, the struggle is becoming, 
 more and more, pacific and intellectual, notwithstanding 
 some atavic recurrences of earlier methods or some 
 psycho-pathological manifestations of individual violence 
 against society and of social violence against individuals. 
 
 The remarkable work of Mr. Novicow 1 has recently 
 given a signal confirmation to my opinion, although 
 Novicow has not taken the sexual struggle into account. 
 
 1 Novicow, Les luttes entre socUUs, lews phases succes- 
 sives, Paris, 1893. Lerda, La lotta per la vita, in Pensiero 
 italiano, Milan, Feb. and March, 1894. 
 
I will develop my demonstration more fully in the 
 chapter devoted to I’avenir moral de Vhumanite (the intel¬ 
 lectual future of humanity), in the second edition of 
 Socialismo e Criminalitd. 
 
 (Tor the moment I have sufficiently replied to the anti¬ 
 socialist objection, since I have shown not merely that 
 the disproportion between the number of births and the 
 number of those who survive tends to constantly dimin¬ 
 ish, but also that the “struggle for existence” itself 
 changes in its essence and grows milder in its processes 
 at each successive phase of the biological and social 
 evolution.) 
 
 Socialism may then insist that human conditions of 
 existence ought to be guaranteed to all men—in exchange 
 for labor furnished to collective society—without thereby 
 contradicting the Darwinian law of the survival of the 
 victors in the struggle for existence, since this Darwinian 
 law ought to be understood and applied in each of its 
 varying manifestations, in harmony with the law of 
 human progress. 
 
 Socialism, scientifically understood, does not deny, and 
 cannot deny, that among mankind there are always some 
 “losers” in the struggle for existence. 
 
 This question is more directly connected with the rela¬ 
 tions which exist between socialism and criminality, since 
 those who contend that the struggle for existence is a 
 law which does not apply to human society, declare, 
 accordingly, that crime (an abnormal and anti-social 
 form of the struggle for life, just as labor is its normal 
 and social form) is destined to disappear. Likewise they 
 think they discover a certain contradiction between 
 
41 
 
 socialism and the teachings of criminal anthropology con¬ 
 cerning the congenital criminal, though these teachings 
 are also deducted from Darwinism. 1 
 
 I reserve this question for fuller treatment elsewhere. 
 Here is in brief my thought as a socialist and as a 
 criminal anthropologist. 
 
 In the first place the school of scientific criminologists 
 deal with life as it now is—and undeniably it has the 
 merit of having applied the methods of experimental 
 science to the study of criminal phenomena, of having 
 shown the hypocritical absurdity of modern penal sys¬ 
 tems based on the notion of free-will and moral delin¬ 
 quency and resulting in the system of cellular confine¬ 
 ment, one of the mental aberrations of the nineteenth 
 century, as I have elsewhere qualified it. In its stead 
 the criminologists wish to substitute the simple segrega¬ 
 tion of individuals who are not fitted for social life on 
 account of pathological conditions nrvncrpni-ta.1 nr 
 
 acquired, permanent or transitory. 
 In the second place, to contend 
 
 cause the disappearance of all forms of crime is to act< 
 upon the impulse of a generous sentiment, but the con- 
 
 1 1 regret that M. Loria, ordinarily so profound and acute, 
 has here been deceived by appearances. He has pointed out 
 this pretended contradiction in his “Economic Foundations 
 of Society” (available in English, Tr.). He has been com¬ 
 pletely answered, in the name of the school of scientific crim¬ 
 inal anthropology, by M. Rivieri de Rocchi, II diritto 
 penale e un’opera recente di Loria in Scuola positiva nella 
 giurisprudenza penale of Feb. 15, 1894, and by M. Lombroso, 
 in Archivio di psichiatria e scienza penali, 1894, XIV. fasc. C. 
 
 
42 
 
 tention is not supported by a rigorously scientific obser¬ 
 vation of the facts. 
 
 The scientific school of criminology demonstrates that 
 crime is a natural and social phenomenon—like insanity 
 and suicide—determined by the abnormal, organic and 
 psychological constitution of the delinquent and by the 
 influences of the physical and social environment. The 
 anthropological, physical and social factors, all, always, 
 act concurrently in the determination of all offences, 
 the lightest as well as the gravest—as, moreover, they do 
 in the case of all other human actions. What varies in 
 the case of each delinquent and each offense, is the 
 decisive intensity of each order of factors. 1 
 
 For instance, if the case in point is an assassination 
 committed through jealousy or hallucination, it is the 
 anthropological factor which is the most important, 
 although nevertheless consideration must also be paid 
 
 1 Enrico Perri, Sociologie criminelle (French translation), 
 1893, Chaps. I. and II. 
 
 A recent work has just given scientific confirmation to our 
 inductions: Forsinari Di Verce, Sulla criminalita e le vicende 
 economiche d'ltalia dal 1873 al 1890. Turin, 1894. The preface 
 written by Lombroso concludes in the following words: 
 “We do not wish, therefore, to slight or neglect the truth of 
 the socialist movement, which is destined to change the 
 current of modern European thought and action, and which 
 contends ad majorem gloriam of its conclusions that all crim¬ 
 inality depends on the influence of the economic environ¬ 
 ment. We also believe in this doctrine, though we are 
 unwilling and unable to accept the erroneous conclusions 
 drawn from it. However enthusiastic we may be, we will 
 never, in its honor, renounce the truth. We leave this useless 
 servility to the upholders of classical orthodoxy.” 
 
43 
 
 to the physical environment and the social environment. 
 If it is a question, on the contrary, of crimes against 
 property or even against persons, committed by a riotous 
 mob or induced by alcoholism, etc., it is the social 
 environment which becomes the preponderating factor, 
 though it is, notwithstanding, impossible to deny the 
 influence of the physical environment and of the an¬ 
 thropological factor. 
 
 We may repeat the same reasoning—in order to make 
 a complete examination of the objection brought against 
 socialism in the name of Darwinism—on the subject of 
 the ordinary diseases; crime, moreover, is a department 
 of human pathology. 
 
 All diseases, acute or chronic, infectious or not infec¬ 
 tious, severe or mild, are the product of the anthropologi¬ 
 cal constitution of the individual and of the influence of 
 the physical and social environment. The decisiveness 
 of the personal conditions or of the environment varies 
 in the various diseases; phthisis or heart disease, for 
 instance, depend principally on the organic constitution 
 of the individual, though it is necessary to take the 
 influence of the environment into account; pellagra, 1 
 cholera, typhus, etc., on the contrary, depend principally 
 on the physical and social conditions of the environment. 
 And so phthisis makes its ravages even among well- 
 to-do people, that is to say, among persons well nourished 
 and well housed, while it is the badly nourished, that 
 is to say, e poor, who furnish the greatest number of 
 victims to pellagra and cholera. 
 
 1 A skin-disense endemic in Northern Italy. Tr. 
 
; * 4 * 
 
 Ct^Q A ^ ^ A^~ 4 1 ^ 
 
 - 44 — 
 
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 £* 
 
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 /£, 
 
 r 
 
 r 
 
 It is, consequently, evident that a socialist regime of 
 collective property which shall assure to every one human 
 conditions of existence, will largely diminish or possibly 
 annihilate—aided by the scientific discoveries and im¬ 
 provement in hygienic measures—the diseases which are 
 principally caused by the conditions of the environment, 
 that is to say by insufficient nourishment or by the want 
 of protection from inclemency of the weather; but we 
 shall not witness the disappearance of the diseases due 
 to traumatic injuries, imprudence, pulmonary affec¬ 
 tions, etc. 
 
 The same conclusions are valid regarding crime. If 
 we suppress poverty and the shocking inequality of 
 economic conditions, hunger, acute and chronic, will no 
 longer serve as a stimulus to crime. Better nourishment 
 will bring about a physical and moral improvement. The 
 abuses of power and of wealth will disappear, and there 
 will be a considerable diminution in the number of crimes 
 due to circumstances (crimes d’occasion), crimes caused 
 principally by the social environment. But there are 
 some crimes which will not disappear, such as revolting 
 crimes against decency due to a pathological perversion 
 of the sexual instinct, homicides induced by epilepsy, 
 thefts which result from a psycho-pathological degen¬ 
 eration, etc. 
 
 For the same reasons popular education will be more 
 widely diffused, talents of every kind will be able to 
 develop and manifest themselves freely; but this will 
 not cause the disappearance of idiocy and imbecility due 
 to hereditary pathological conditions. Nevertheless it 
 will be possible for different causes to have a preventive 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
45 
 
 and mitigating influence on the various forms of con¬ 
 genital degeneration (ordinary diseases, criminality, 
 insanity and nervous disorders). Among these preven¬ 
 tive influences may be: a better economic and social 
 organization, the prudential counsels, constantly growing 
 in efficacy given by experimental biology, and less and 
 less frequent procreation, by means of voluntary absten¬ 
 tion, in cases of hereditary disease. 
 
 To conclude we will say that, even under the socialist 
 regime—although they will be infinitely fewer—there 
 will always be some who will be vanquished in the 
 struggle for existence 1 —these will be the victims of. weak- 
 ness, of disease, of dissipation, of nervous disorders, of 
 suicide. We may then affirm that socialism does not 
 deny the Darwinian law of the struggle for 'existence. 
 Socialism will, however, have this indisputable advan¬ 
 tage—the epidemic or endemic forms of human degen¬ 
 eracy will be entirely suppressed by the elimination of 
 their principal cause—the physical poverty and (its 
 necessary consequence) the mental suffering of the 
 majority. 
 
 Then the struggle for existence, while remaining 
 always the driving power of the life of society, will 
 assume forms less and less brutal and more and more 
 humane. It will become an intellectual struggle. Its 
 ideal of physiological and intellectual progress will con¬ 
 stantly grow in grandeur and sublimity when this pro¬ 
 gressive idealization of the ideal shall be made possible 
 by the guarantee to every one of daily bread for the 
 body and the mind. 
 
 The law of the “struggle for life” must not cause 
 
 JJ 
 
 4 ^" & 
 
us to forget another law of natural and social Darwinian 
 evolution. It is true many socialists have given to this 
 latter law an excessive and exclusive importance, just 
 as some individuals have entirely neglected it. I refer 
 to the law of solidarity which knits together all the living 
 beings of one and the same species—for instance ani¬ 
 mals who live gregariously in consequence of the abun¬ 
 dance of the supply of their common food (herbivorous 
 animals)—or even of different species. When species 
 thus mutually aid each other to live they are called by 
 naturalists symbiotic species, and instead of the struggle 
 for life we have co-operation for life. 
 
 It is incorrect to state that the struggle for life is the 
 sole sovereign law in Nature and society, just as it is 
 false to contend that this law is wholly inapplicable to 
 human society. The real truth is that even in human 
 society the struggle for life is an eternal law which grows 
 progressively milder in its methods and more elevated in 
 its ideals. But operating concurrently with this we find 
 a law, the influence of which upon the social evolution 
 constantly increases, the law of solidarity or co-operation 
 between living beings. 
 
 Even in animal societies mutual aid against the forces 
 of Nature, or against other animals is of constant ocur- 
 rence, and this is carried much further among human 
 beings, even among savage tribes. One notes this 
 phenomenon especially in tribes which on account of 
 the favorable character of their environment, or because 
 their subsistence is assured and abundant, become of the 
 industrial or peaceful type. The military or warlike 
 type which is unhappily predominant (on account of the 
 
47 
 
 uncertainty and insufficiency of subsistence) among 
 primitive mankind and in reactionary phases of civiliza¬ 
 tion, presents us with less frequent examples of it. The 
 industrial type constantly tends, moreover, as Spencer 
 has shown, to take the place of the warlike type. 1 
 
 Confining ourselves to human society alone, we will 
 say that, while in the first stages of the social evolution 
 the law of the struggle for life takes precedence over 
 the law of solidarity, with the growth within the social 
 organism of the division of labor which binds the various 
 parts of the social whole more closely together in inter¬ 
 dependence, the struggle for life grows milder and is 
 metamorphosed, and the law of co-operation or solidarity 
 gains more and more both in efficiency and in the range 
 of its influence, and this is due to that fundamental 
 reason that Marx pointed out, and which constitutes his 
 great scientific discovery, the reason that in the one case 
 the conditions of existence—food especially—are not 
 assured, and in the other case they are. 
 
 
 
 In the lives of individuals as in the life of societies, 
 when the means of subsistence, that is to say, the physical 
 basis of existence, are assured, the law of solidarity takes 
 precedence over the law of the struggle for existence, 
 and when they are not assured, the contrary is true. 
 
 n > 
 
 JV 
 
 M 
 
 1 See in this connection the famous monographs of ( (: , 
 
 Kropotkin, Mutual aid among the savages, in the “Nineteenth 
 Century,” April 9, 1891, and Among the barbarians, “Nine- * 
 teenth Century,” January, 1892, and also two recent articles 
 signed: “Un Professeur,” which appeared in the Revue So- 
 cialiste, of Paris, May and June, 1894, under the title: Lutte 
 ou accord pour la vie. *7 *■-'**'7 
 
 r 
 
 / 0 
 
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 W" 
 
 / 
 
 v 
 
 V- 
 
 
 re 
 
 /■-j Q.. 
 
 ., ,€* v 
 
 -••? 
 
 48 
 
 ^Among savages, infanticide and parricide are not only 
 permitted but are obligatory and sanctioned by religion 
 if the tribe inhabits an island where food is scarce (for 
 instance, in Polynesia), and they are immoral and crimi¬ 
 nal acts on continents where the food supply is more 
 abundant and certain. 1 j 
 
 Just so, in our present society, as the majority of 
 individuals are not sure of getting their daily bread, the 
 struggle for life, or “free competition,” as the individual¬ 
 ists call it, assumes more cruel and more brutal forms. 
 
 Just as soon as through collective ownership every 
 individual shall be assured of fitting conditions of exist¬ 
 ence, the law of solidarity will become preponderant. 
 f|When. in a family financial affairs run smoothly and 
 prosperously, harmony and mutual good-will prevail; as 
 soon as poverty makes its appearance, discord and strug¬ 
 gle ensue. Society as a whole shows us the picture on a 
 large scale. x4 better social organization will insure uni¬ 
 versal harmonyjmd mutual good-will.^ 
 
 This will be the achievement of socialism, and, to 
 repeat, for this, the fullest and most fruitful inter¬ 
 pretation of the inexorable natural laws discovered by 
 Darwinism, we are indebted to socialism. 
 
 
 
 -A \ | 
 
 aIa; 
 
 
 1 Enrico Ferri, Omicidio nelV antropologia criminate, In¬ 
 troduction, Turin, 189 4 . 
 
 / s*- ; -A 
 
 I* 
 
 i; 
 
 
49 — 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 
 
 The third and last part of the argument of Haeckel 
 is correct if applied solely to the purely biological and 
 Darwinian domain, but its starting point is false if it is 
 intended to apply it to the social domain and to turn 
 it into an objection against socialism. 
 
 It is said the struggle for existence assures the sur¬ 
 vival of the fittest; it therefore causes an aristocratic, 
 hierarchic gradation of selected individuals—a continu¬ 
 ous progress—and not the democratic leveling of social¬ 
 ism. 
 
 Here again, let us begin by accurately ascertaining the 
 nature of this famous natural selection which results 
 from the struggle for existence. 
 
 The expression which Haeckel uses and which, more¬ 
 over, is in current use, “survival of the best or of the best 
 fitted,” ought to be corrected. We must suppress the 
 adjective best . This is simply a persisting relic of that 
 teleology which used to see in Nature and history a 
 premeditated goal to be reached by means of a process 
 of continuous amelioration or progress. 
 
 Darwinism, on the contrary, and still more the theory 
 of universal evolution, has completely banished the 
 notion of final causes from modern scientific thought 
 and from the interpretation of natural phenomena. Evo- 
 

 
 
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 &***+-jf 
 
 .4-' •!_ 50 ' ll ' 
 
 lution consists both of involution and dissolution. It 
 may be true, and indeed it is true, that by comparing 
 the two extremes of the path traversed by humanity we 
 find that there has really been a true progress, an im¬ 
 provement taking it all in all; but, in any case, progress 
 has not followed a straight ascending line, but, as Goethe 
 has said, a spiral with rhythms of progress and of retro¬ 
 gression, of evolution and of dissolution. 
 
 Every cycle of evolution, in the individual life as in 
 the collective life, bears within it the germs of the cor¬ 
 responding cycle of dissolution; and, inversely, the latter, 
 by the decay of the form already worn out, prepares in 
 the eternal laboratory new evolutions and new forms of 
 life. 
 
 ( It is thus that in the world of human society every 
 phase of civilization bears within it and is constantly 
 developing the germs of its own dissolution from which 
 issues a new phase of civilization—which will be more 
 or less different from its predecessor in geographical 
 situation and range—in the eternal rhythm of living 
 humanity. The ancient hieratic civilizations of the 
 Orient decay, and through their dissolution they give 
 birth to the Graeco-Boman world, which in turn is fol¬ 
 lowed by the feudal and aristocratic civilization of Cen¬ 
 tral Europe; it also decays and disintegrates t hrough its 
 own excesses, like the preceding civilizations, and it is 
 replaced by the bourgeois civilization which has reached 
 its culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon world. But 
 it is already experiencing the first tremors of the fever 
 of dissolution, while from its womb there emerges and 
 is developing the socialist civilization which will flourish 
 
 Kj ' J 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 ft A 
 
 r> Jr 
 
 V-"i -A,* Xs. 
 
 
 ! ! 
 
 & 
 
over a vaster domain than that of any of the civilizations 
 
 which have preceded it. 1 j 
 
 Hence it is not correct to assert that the natural 
 selection caused by the struggle for existence assures 
 the survival of the best; in fact, it assures the survival 
 of the best fitted. 
 
 This is a very great difference, alike in natural Darwin¬ 
 ism and in social Darwinism. 
 
 The struggle for existence necessarily causes the sur¬ 
 vival of the individuals best fitted for the environment 
 and the particular historical period in which they live. 
 
 In the natural, biological domain, the free play of 
 natural (cosmiques) forces and conditions causes a pro¬ 
 gressive advance or ascent of living forms, from the 
 microbe up to Man. 
 
 In human society, on the contrary, that is to say, in 
 the super-organic evolution of Herbert Spencer, the 
 intervention of other forces and the occurrence of other 
 conditions sometimes causes a retrograde selection which 
 always assures the survival of those who are best fitted 
 for a given environment at a given time, but the con¬ 
 trolling principle of this selection is in turn affected by 
 the vicious conditions—if they are vicious—of the 
 
 environment. 
 
 Here we are dealing with the question of “social 
 selection,” or rather “social selections,” for there is more 
 
 than one kind of social selection. By starting from this 
 
 1 One of the most characteristic processes of social dis¬ 
 solution is parasitism. Massart and Vandervelde, Para¬ 
 sitism, organic and social. (English translation.) Swan, 
 Sonnenschein & Co., London. 
 
 itS , 
 
 / 
 
idea—not clearly comprehended—some writers, both 
 socialists and non-socialists, have come to deny that the 
 Darwinian theories have any application to human 
 society. 
 
 (It is known, indeed, that in the contemporaneous 
 civilized world natural selection is injuriously inter¬ 
 fered with by military selection, by matrimonial selec¬ 
 tion, and, above all, by economic selection. 1 / 
 
 The temporary celibacy imposed upon soldiers cer¬ 
 tainly has a deplorable effect upon the human race. It 
 is the young men who on account of comparatively poor 
 physical constitutions are excused from military service, 
 who marry the first, while the healthier individuals are 
 condemned to a transitory sterility, and in the great 
 cities run the risk of contagion from syphilis which 
 unfortunately has permanent effects. 
 
 Marriage also, corrupted as it is in the existent society 
 by economic considerations, is ordinarily in practice a 
 sort of retrogressive sexual selection. Women who are 
 true degenerates, but who have good dowries or “pros¬ 
 pects,” readily find husbands on the marriage market, 
 while the most robust women of the people or of the 
 middle class who have no dowries are condemned to the 
 
 1 Broca, Les selections (§ 6. Les selections sociales) in 
 Memoires d ’ anthropologie, Paris, 1877, III., 205. Lapouge, 
 Les selections sociales, in Revue d’ anthrop., 1887, p. 519. Loria, 
 Discorse su Carlo Darwin, Sienne, 1882. Vadala, Darwinismo 
 naturale e Darwinismo sociale, Turin, 1883. Bordier, La vie 
 des socUtes, Paris, 1887. Sergi, Le degenerazione umane, 
 Milan, 1889, p. 158. Bebel, Woman in the past, present and 
 future. 
 
53 
 
 sterility of compulsory old-maiddom or to surrender 
 themselves to a more or less gilded prostitution. 1 
 
 It is indisputable that the present economic conditions 
 exercise an influence upon all the social relations of men. 
 The mo nopoly/of w ealth assures to its possessor the vic¬ 
 tory in the struggle for existence. Kich people, even 
 though they are less robust, have longer lives than those 
 who are ill-fed. The day-and-night-work, under in¬ 
 human conditions, imposed upon grown men, and the 
 still more baleful labor imposed upon women and chil¬ 
 dren by modern capitalism causes a constant deteriora¬ 
 tion in the biological conditions of the toiling masses. 2 
 
 fin addition to all these we must not forget the moral 
 selection—which is really immoral or retrograde—made 
 at present by capitalism in its struggle with the prole¬ 
 tariat, and which favors the survival of those with servile 
 characters, while it persecutes and strives to suppress all 
 those who are strong in character, and all who do not 
 
 1 Max Nordau, Conventional Lies of our Civilization. 
 (English trans.) Laird & Lee, Chicago, 1895. 
 
 8 While this is shown by all official statistics, it is sig- 
 rally shown by the facts collated by M. Pagliani, the present 
 Director-General of the Bureau of Health in the Interior 
 Department, who has shown that the bodies of the poor are 
 more backward and less developed than those of the rich, 
 and that this difference, though but slightly manifest at 
 birth, becomes greater and greater in after life, i. e., as soon 
 as the influence of the economic conditions makes itself felt 
 in all its inexorable tyranny. 
 
seem disposed to tamely submit to the yoke of the present 
 economic order. 1 j 
 
 The first impression which springs from the recog¬ 
 nition of these facts is that the Darwinian law of natural 
 selection does not hold good in human society—in short, 
 is inapplicable to human society. 
 
 I have maintained, and I do maintain, on the con¬ 
 trary, in the first place, that these various kinds of 
 retrograde social selection are not in contradiction with 
 the Darwinian law, and that, moreover, they serve as 
 the material for an argument in favor of socialism. 
 Nothing but socialism, in fact, can make this inexorable 
 law of natural selection work more beneficentlv. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the Darwinian law does not cause 
 the “survival of the best” but simply the “survival of 
 the fittest” 
 
 It is obvious that the forms of degeneracy produced 
 by the divers kinds of social selection and notably by the 
 present economic organization merely promote, indeed, 
 and with growing efficiency, the survival of those best 
 fitted for this very economic organization. 
 
 If the victors in the struggle for existence are the 
 worst and the weakest, this does not mean that the 
 Darwinian law does not hold good; it means simply 
 that the environment is corrupt (and corrupting), and 
 that those who survive are precisely those who are the 
 fittest for this corrupt environment. 
 
 In my studies of criminal psychology I have too often 
 
 1 Ttjkati, Selezione servile, in Gritica Sociale, June 1, 1894. 
 Sergi, Degenerazione umane, Milan, 1889. 
 
had to recognize the fact that in prisons and in the crimi¬ 
 nal world it is the m ost cruel or. tha most cunning 
 criminals who enjoy the fruits of victory; it is just the 
 same in our modern economic individualist system; the 
 victory goes to him who has the fewest scruples; the 
 struggle for existence favors him who is fittest for a 
 world where a man is valued for what he has (no matter 
 how he got it), and not for what he is. 
 
 The Darwinian law of natural selection functions, then 
 even in human society. The error of those who deny 
 this proposition springs from the fact that they con¬ 
 found the present environment and the present transitory 
 historical era.—which are known in history as the bour¬ 
 geois environment and period, just as the Middle Ages 
 are called feudal —with all history and all humanity, 
 and therefore they fail to see that the disastrous effects 
 of modern, retrograde, social selection are only confirma¬ 
 tions of the Darwinian law of the “survival of the fittest.” 
 Popular common sense has long recognized this influence 
 of the surroundings, as is shown by many a common 
 proverb, and its scientific explanation is to be found in 
 the necessary biological relations which exist between a 
 given environment and the individuals who are born, 
 struggle and survive in that environment. 
 
 On the other hand, this truth constitutes an unan¬ 
 swerable argument in favor of socialism. By freeing the 
 environment from all the corruptiojis with which our 
 unbridled economic individualism pollutes it, socialism 
 will necessarily correct the ill effects of natural and 
 social selection. In a physically and morally wholesome 
 environment, the individuals best fitted to it, those who 
 
will therefore survive, will be the physically and morally 
 healthy. 
 
 In the struggle for existence the victory will then go 
 to him Who has the greatest and most prolific physical, 
 intellectual and moral energies. The collectivist eco- 
 nomic organization, by assuring to everyone the condi¬ 
 tions of existence, will and necessarily must, result in the 
 physical and moral improvement of the human race. 
 
 To this some one replies: Suppose we grant that 
 socialism and Darwinian selection may be reconciled, is 
 it not obvious that the survival of the fittest tends to 
 establish an aristocratic gradation of individuals, which 
 is contrary to socialistic leveling? 
 
 I have already answered this objection in part by 
 pointing out that socialism will assure to all individuals V 
 —instead of as at present only to a privileged few or 
 to society’s heroes—freedom to assert and develop their 
 own individualities. Then in truth the result of the 
 
 / 
 
 struggle for existence will be the survival of the best 
 and this for the very reason that in a w holesom e, environ-r Z 
 ment the victory is won by the healthiest individuals, i 
 Social Darwinism, then, as a continuation and comple¬ 
 ment of natural (biological) Darwinism, will result in a 
 selection of the best. 
 
 To respond fully to this insistence upon an unlimited 
 aristocratic selection, I must call attention to another 
 natural law which serves to complete that rhythm of 
 action and reaction which results in the equilibrium 
 of life. 
 
 To the Darwinian law of natural inequalities we must 
 add another law which is inseparable from it, and which 
 
57 
 
 Jacoby, following in the track of the labors of Morel, 
 Lucas, Galton, De Caudole, Ribot, Spencer, Royer, 
 Lombroso, and others, has clearly demonstrated and 
 expounded. 
 
 This same Nature, which makes “choice” and aristo¬ 
 cratic gradation a condition of vital progress, afterwards 
 restores the equilibrium by a leveling and democratic 
 law. 
 
 “From the infinite throng of humanity there emerge 
 individuals, families and races which tend to rise above 
 the common level; painfully climbing the steep heights 
 they reach the summits of power, wealth, intelligence 
 and talent, and, having reached the goal, they are hurled 
 down and disappear in the abysses of insanity and degen¬ 
 eration. Death is the great leveler; by destroying every 
 one who rises above the common herd, it democratizes 
 humanity.” 1 
 
 Every one who attempts to create a monopoly of 
 natural forces comes into violent conflict with that 
 supreme law of Nature which has given to all living 
 beings the use and disposal of the natural agents: air 
 and light, water and land. 
 
 Everybody who is too much above or too much below 
 the average of humanity—an average which rises with 
 
 1 Jacoby, Etudes sur la selection dans ses rapports avec 
 VMrtdite cliez Vhomme , Paris, 1881, p. 606. 
 
 Lombroso, L’uomo di genio, 6th edition, Turin, 1894, has 
 developed and complemented this law.- This law, so easily 
 forgotten, is neglected by Ritciiie (Darwinism and Politics. 
 London. Sonnenschein, 1891.) in the section called “Does the 
 doctrine of Heredity support Aristocracy?” 
 
 
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58 
 
 the flux of time, but is absolutely fixed at any given 
 moment of history—does not live and disappears from 
 the stage. 
 
 The idiot and the man of genius, the starving wretch 
 and the millionaire, the dwarf and the giant, are so 
 many natural or social monsters, and Nature inexorably 
 blasts them with degeneracy or sterility, no matter 
 whether they be the product of the organic life, or the 
 effect of the social organization. 
 
 And so, all families possessing a monopoly of any kind 
 —monopoly of power, of wealth or of talent—are inevi¬ 
 tably destined to become in their latest offshoots im¬ 
 beciles, sterile or suicides, and finally to become extinct. 
 Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, descendants of 
 millionaires—all follow the common law which, here 
 again, serves to confirm the inductions—in this sense, 
 equalitarian—of science and of socialism. 
 
V. 
 
 SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. 
 
 Not one of the three contradictions between socialism 
 and Darwinism, which Haeckel formulated, and which 
 so many others have echoed since, resists a candid and 
 more accurate examination of the natural laws which 
 bear the name of Charles Darwin. 
 
 I add that not only is Darwinism not in contradiction 
 with socialism, but that it constitutes one of its funda¬ 
 mental scientific premises. As Virchow justly remarked, 
 socialism is nothing but a logical and vital corollary, in 
 part of Darwinism, in part of Spencerian evolution. 
 
 The theory of Darwin, whether we wish it or not, by 
 demonstrating that man is descended from the animals, 
 has dealt a severe blow to the belief in God as the 
 creator of the universe and of man by a special fiat. Thi3, 
 moreover, is why the most bitter opposition, and the only 
 opposition which still continues, to its scientific induc¬ 
 tions, was made and is made in the name of religion. 
 
 It is true that Darwin did not declare himself an 
 atheist 1 and that Spencer is not one; it is also true that, 
 
 1 Darwin never made a declaration of atheism, but that 
 was in fact his way of looking at the problem (“sa manure 
 <le voir."). 
 
 While Haeckel, concerned solely with triumphing over the 
 opposition, said at the Congress of Eisenach (1882) that 
 
strictly speaking, the theory of Darwin, like that of 
 Spencer, can also be reconciled with the belief in God, 
 since it may be admitted that God created matter and 
 force, and that both afterward evolved into their succes¬ 
 sive forms in accordance with the initial creative impulse. 
 Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that these theories, by 
 rendering the idea of causality more and more inflexible 
 and universal, lead necessarily to the negation of God, 
 since there always remains this question: And God, 
 who created him? And if it is replied that God has 
 always existed, the same reply may be flung back by 
 asserting that the universe has always existed. |To use 
 the phrase of Ardigo, human thought is only able to con¬ 
 ceive the chain which binds effects to causes as termina¬ 
 ting at a given point, purely conventional. 1 J 
 
 God, as Laplace said, is an hypothesis of which exact 
 science has no need; he is, according to Herzen, at the 
 most an X, which represents not the unknowable —as 
 
 Darwin was not an atheist, Buchner, on the contrary, pub¬ 
 lished shortly afterward a letter which Darwin had written 
 him, and in which he avowed that “since the age of forty 
 years, his scientific studies had led him to atheism.” 
 
 (See also, “Charles Darwin and Karl Marx: A Comparison,” 
 by Ed. Aveling. Published by the Twentieth Century Press, 
 London.—Translator.) 
 
 In the same way, John Stuart Mill never declared himself 
 a Socialist, but that, nevertheless, in opinion he was one, is 
 made evident by his autobiography and his posthumous 
 fragments on Socialism. (See “The Socialism of John Stuart 
 Mill.” Humboldt Pub. Co., New York.—Tr.) 
 
 1 Ardig6 , La Formazione naturale, Vol. II. of his Opere 
 filologiche, and Vol. VI., La Ragione, Padone, 1894. 
 
61 
 
 Spencer and Dubois Raymond contend—but all that 
 which humanity does not yet know. Therefore, it is a 
 variable X which decreases in direct ratio to the progress 
 of the discoveries of science. 
 
 ( It is for this very reason that science and religion are 
 in inverse ratio to each other; the one diminishes and 
 grows weaker in the same proportion that the other 
 increases and grows stronger in its struggle against the 
 unknown. * 1 f 
 
 And if this is one of the consequences of Darwinism, 
 its influence on the development of socialism is quite 
 obvious. v 
 
 The disappearance of faith in the hereafter, where the 
 poor shall become the elect of the Lord, and where the 
 miseries of the “vale of tears” will find an eternal com¬ 
 pensation in paradise, gives greater strength to the desire 
 for some semblance of an “earthly paradise” here below 
 even for the unfortunate and the poor, who are the great 
 majority. 
 
 Hartmann and Guyau 2 have shown that the evolution 
 of religious beliefs may be summarized thus: All religions 
 include, with various other matters, the promise of hap¬ 
 piness; but the primitive religions concede that this 
 
 1 Guyau, L’lrreligion de Vavenir. Paris. 1887. 
 
 1 The dominant factor, nevertheless, in religious beliefs, 
 is the hereditary or traditional sentimental factor; this it is 
 which always renders them respectable when they are pro¬ 
 fessed in good faith, and often makes them even appeal to 
 our sympathies,—and this is precisely because of the in¬ 
 genuous or refined sensibility of the persons in whom reli¬ 
 
 gious faith is the most vital and sincere. 
 
happiness will be realized during the life of the individual 
 himself, and the later religions, through an excess of 
 reaction, place its realization after death, outside the 
 human world; in the final phase, this realization of happi¬ 
 ness is once more placed within the field of human life, 
 no longer in the ephemeral moment of the individual 
 existence, but indeed in the continuous evolution of all 
 mankind. 
 
 On this side, then, socialism is closely related to the 
 religious evolution, and tends to substitute itself for 
 religion, since its aim is for humanity to have its own 
 “earthly paradise” here, without having to wait for it 
 in the hereafter , which, to say the least, is very problem¬ 
 atical. 
 
 Therefore, it has been very justly remarked that the 
 socialist movement has many traits in common with, for 
 example, primitive Christianity, notably that ardent faith 
 in the ideal that has definitively deserted the arid field of 
 bourgeois skepticism, and some savants, not socialists, 
 such as Messrs. Wallace, de Lavaleye and the Roberty, etc., 
 admit that it is entirely possible for socialism to replace 
 by its humanitarian faith the faith in the hereafter of the 
 former religions. 
 
 More direct and potent than these relations (between 
 socialism and faith in a hereafter) are, however, the rela¬ 
 tions which exist between socialism and the belief in 
 God. 
 
 It is true that Marxian Socialism, since the Congress 
 held at Erfurt (1891), has rightly declared that religious 
 
63 
 
 beliefs are private affairs 1 and that, therefore, the So¬ 
 cialist partj~combats religious intolerance under all its 
 forms, whether it be directed against Catholics 2 or against 
 Jews, as I have shown in an article against Anti-Sem¬ 
 itism . 3 But this breadth of superiority of view is, at bot¬ 
 tom, only a consequence of the confidence in final vic¬ 
 tory. 
 
 It is because socialism knows and foresees that relig¬ 
 ious beliefs, whether one regards them, with Sergi, 4 as 
 pathological phenomena of human psychology, or as use¬ 
 less phenomena of moral incrustation, are destined to 
 perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary 
 scientific culture. This is why socialism does not feel 
 the necessity of waging a special warfare against these 
 religious beliefs which are destined to disappear. It has 
 assumed this attitude although it knows that the ab¬ 
 sence or the impairment of the belief in God is one of 
 the most powerful factors for its extension, because the 
 priests of all religions have been, throughout all the 
 phases of history, the most potent allies of the ruling 
 classes in keeping the masses pliant and submissive un¬ 
 der the yoke by means of the enchantment of religion, 
 just as the tamer keeps wild beasts submissive by the ter¬ 
 rors of the cracks of his whip. 
 
 And this is so true that the most clear-sighted con- 
 
 1 Nitti, LeSocialisme catkolique, Paris, 1894, p. 27 and 393. 
 
 * Its usual form in America.—Translator. 
 
 ' Nuova Rassegna, August, 1894. 
 
 4 Sergi, Uorigine del fenomeni psichici e loro significazione 
 biologica, Milan, 1885, p. 334, et seq. 
 
servatives, even though they are atheists, regret that the 
 religious sentiment—that precious narcotic—is diminish¬ 
 ing among the masses, because they see in it, though 
 their pharisaism does not permit them to say it openly, 
 an instrument of political domination. 1 
 
 Unfortunately, or fortunately, the religious sentiment 
 cannot be re-established by royal decree. If it is dis¬ 
 appearing, the blame for this cannot be laid at the door 
 of any particular individual, and there is no need of a 
 special propaganda against it, because its antidote im¬ 
 pregnates the air we breathe—saturated with the induc¬ 
 tions of experimental science—and religion no longer 
 meets with conditions favorable to its development as 
 it did amid the superstitious ignorance of past centuries. 
 
 1 have thus shown the direct influence of modern 
 science, science based on observation and experiment,— 
 which has substituted the idea of natural causality for 
 the ideas of miracle and divinity,—on the extremely 
 rapid development and on the experimental foundation 
 of contemporary socialism. 
 
 Democratic socialism does not look with unfriendly 
 eyes upon “Catholic Socialism” (the Christian Socialism 
 of Southern Europe), since it has nothing to fear from it. 
 
 Catholic socialism, in fact, aids in the propagation of 
 socialist ideas, especially in the rural districts where re¬ 
 ligious faith and practices are still very vigorous, hut it 
 
 |■ iirrwmrrmiinrm mihi«ni*Tmr wntirirnnui. pi» rr 
 
 1 Dukkheim, De la division du travail social. Paris. 1893. 
 As regards the pretended influence of religion on personal 
 morality I have shown how very slight a foundation there 
 was for this opinion in my studies on criminal psychology, 
 and more particularly in Omicidio nclV antropologia criminale. 
 
65 
 
 will not win and wear the palm of victory ad majorem 
 dei gloriatn. As I have shown, there is a growing antag¬ 
 onism between science and religion, and the socialist 
 varnish cannot preserve Catholicism. The “earthly” 
 socialism has, moreover, a much greater attractive power. 
 
 When the peasants shall have become familiar with the 
 views of Catholic socialism, it will be very easy for dem¬ 
 ocratic socialism to rally them under its own flag—they 
 will, indeed, convert themselves. 
 
 Socialism occupies an analogous position with regard 
 to republicanism. Just as atheism is a private affair 
 which concerns the individual conscience, so a republican 
 form of government is a private affair which interests 
 only a part of the bourgeoisie. Certainly, by the time 
 that socialism draw’s near to its day of triumph, atheism 
 will have made immense progress, and a republican form 
 of government w r ill have been established in many coun¬ 
 tries which to-day submit to a monarchical regime. But 
 it is not socialism which develops atheism, any more 
 than it is socialism which will establish republicanism. 
 Atheism is a product of the theories of Darwin and 
 Spencer in the present bourgeois civilization, and repub¬ 
 licanism has been and will be, in the various countries, 
 the work of a portion of the capitalist bourgeoisie, as 
 was recently said in some of the conservative newspapers 
 of Milan (Corriere della sera and Idea liberate), when “the 
 monarchy shall no longer serve the interests of the coun¬ 
 try,” that is to say of the class in power. 
 
 The evolution from absolute monarchy to constitu¬ 
 tional monarchy and to republicanism is an obvious his¬ 
 torical law; in the present phase of civilization the only 
 
66 
 
 
 difference between the two latter is in the elective or 
 hereditary character of the head of the State. In the 
 various countries of Europe, the bourgeoisie themselves 
 will demand the transition from monarchy to republican¬ 
 ism, in order to put off as long as possible the triumph of 
 socialism. In Italy as in France, in England as in Spain, 
 we see only too many republicans or "radicals” whose 
 attitude with regard to social questions is more bour¬ 
 geois and more conservative than that of the intelligent 
 conservatives. At Montecitorio, for example, there is 
 Imbriani whose opinions on religious and social mat¬ 
 ters are more conservative than those of M. di Rudini. 
 Imbriani, whose personality is moreover very attractive, 
 has never attacked the priests or monks—this man who 
 attacks the entire universe and very often with good 
 reason, although without much success on account of 
 mistaken methods—and he was the only one to oppose 
 even the consideration of a law proposed by the Depute 
 Ferrari, which increased the tax on estates inherited by 
 collateral heirs! 
 
 Socialism then has no more interest in preaching re¬ 
 publicanism than it has in preaching atheism. To each 
 his role (or task), is the law of division of labor. The 
 struggle for atheism is the business of science; the es¬ 
 tablishment of republicanism in the various countries of 
 Europe has been and will be the work of the bourgeoisie 
 themselves—whether they be conservative or radical. 
 All this constitutes the historical progress toward so¬ 
 cialism, and individuals are powerless to prevent or delay 
 the succession of the phases of the moral, political and 
 asocial evolution. 
 
 * 
 
67 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES. 
 
 It can also be shown that scientific socialism proceeds 
 directly from Darwinism by an examination of the dif¬ 
 ferent modes of conceiving of the individual in relation 
 to the species. 
 
 The eighteenth century closed with the exclusive glor¬ 
 ification of the individual, of the man —as an entity in 
 himself. In the works of Kousseau this was only a 
 beneficent, though exaggerated re-action against the po¬ 
 litical and sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages. 
 
 This individualism led directly to that artificiality in 
 politics, which I will consider a little further on in study¬ 
 ing the relations between the theory of evolution and 
 socialism, and which is common to the ruling classes un¬ 
 der the bourgeois regime and to the individualistic an¬ 
 archists,—since both alike imagine that the social organ¬ 
 ization can be changed in a day by the magical effect of 
 a bomb,—more or less murderous. 
 
 Modern biology has radically changed this conception 
 of the individual and it has demonstrated, in the domain 
 of biology as in that of sociology, that the individual is 
 himself only an aggregation of more simple living ele¬ 
 ments, and likewise that the individual in himself, the 
 Selbstivesen of the Germans, does not exist in inde- 
 
— 68 — 
 
 pendent isolation, but only as a member of a society 
 (Gliedwesen). 
 
 Every living object is an association, a collectivity. 
 
 The monad itself, the living cell, the irreducible ex¬ 
 pression of biological individuality, is also an aggregate 
 of various parts (nucleus, nucleole, protoplasm), and each 
 one of them in its turn is an aggregate of molecules which 
 are aggregates of atoms. 
 
 The atom does not exist alone, as an individual; the 
 atom is invisible and impalpable and it does not live. 
 
 And the complexity of the aggregation, the federation 
 of the parts constantly increases with the ascent in the 
 zoological series from protozoa to Man. 
 
 Unifying, Jacobin artificiality corresponds to the meta¬ 
 physics of individualism, just as the conception of na¬ 
 tional and international federalism corresponds to the 
 scientific character of modern socialism. 
 
 The organism of a mammal is simply a federation of 
 tissues, organs and anatomical machinery; the organism 
 of a society can consist of nothing but a federation of 
 communes, provinces and regions; the organism of hu¬ 
 manity can be nothing but a federation of nations. 
 
 If it is absurd to conceive of a mammal whose head 
 should have to move in the same fashion as the extrem¬ 
 ities and all of whose extremities would have to perform 
 the same motions simultaneously, there is no less ab¬ 
 surdity in a political and administrative organization in 
 which the extreme northern province or the mountain¬ 
 ous province, for instance, have to have the same bureau¬ 
 cratic machinery, the same body of laws, the same meth¬ 
 ods, etc., as the extreme southern province or the prov- 
 
 
69 
 
 ince made up of plains, solely through the passion for 
 symmetrical uniformity, that pathological expression of 
 unity. 
 
 If we disregard those considerations of a political order 
 which make it possible to conclude, as I have done else¬ 
 where, 1 that the only possible organization for Italy, as 
 for every other country, appeared to me to be that of 
 an administrative federalism combined with political 
 unity, we can regard it as manifest, that at the close of 
 the nineteenth century the individual, as an independent 
 entity, is dethroned alike in” biology and sociology. 
 
 The individual exists, but only in so far as he forms a 
 part of a social aggregate. 
 
 Eobinson Crusoe—that perfect type of individualism 
 —can not possibly be aught but a legend or a pathological 
 specimen. 
 
 The species—that is to say, the social aggregate— is 
 the great, the living and eternal reality of life, as has 
 been demonstrated by Darwinism and confirmed by all 
 the inductive sciences from astronomy to sociology. 
 
 At the close of the eighteenth century Eousseau 
 thought that the individual alone existed, and that 
 society was an artificial product of the “social contract” 
 and, as he attributed (just as Aristotle had done in the 
 case of slavery) a permanent human character to the 
 transitory manifestations of the period, such as the rot¬ 
 tenness of the regime under which he lived, he further 
 thought that Society was the cause of all evils, and that 
 individuals are all born good and equal. At the end of 
 
 1 Sociologie criminelle, French trans., Paris, 1892. 
 
the nineteenth century, on the contrary, all the inductive 
 sciences agree in recognizing that society, the social ag¬ 
 gregate, is a fact of Nature, inseparable from life, in the 
 vegetable species as in the animal species, from the low¬ 
 est “animal colonies” of zoophytes up to societies of mam¬ 
 mals (herbivora), and to human society. 1 
 
 All that is best in the individual, he owes to the social 
 life, although every phase of evolution is marked at its 
 decline by pathological conditions of social decay—essen¬ 
 tially transitory, however—which inevitably precede a 
 new cycle of social renovation. 
 
 The individual, as such, if he could live, would fulfill 
 only one of the two fundamental requirements (needs) 
 of existence: alimentation—that is to say, the selfish 
 preservation of his own organism, by means of that pri¬ 
 mordial and fundamental function, which Aristotle 
 designated by the name of ctesi —the conquest of food. 
 
 1 1 cannot consider here the recent attempt at eclecticism 
 made by M. Fouillde and others. M. Fouillde wishes to 
 oppose, or at least to add, to the naturalistic conception of 
 society the consensual or contractual conception. Evidently, 
 since no theory is absolutely false, there is even in this 
 consensual theory a share of truth, and the liberty of 
 emigration may be an instance of it—as long as this liberty 
 is compatible with the economic interests of the class in 
 power. But, obviously, this consent, which does not exist 
 at the birth of each individual into such or such a society 
 (and this fact of birth is the most decisive and tyrannical 
 factor in life) also has very little to do with the develop¬ 
 ment of his aptitudes and tendencies, dominated as they 
 are by the iron law of the economic and political organiza¬ 
 tion in which he is an atom. 
 
But all individuals have to live in society because a 
 second fundamental requirement of life imposes itself 
 upon the individual, viz., the reproduction of beings like 
 himself for the preservation of the species. It is this 
 life of relationship and reproduction (sexual and social) 
 which gives birth to the moral or social sense, which 
 enables the individual not only to be, but to co-exist with 
 his fellows . 
 
 It may be said that these two fundamental instincts 
 of life—bread and love—by their functioning maintain 
 a social equilibrium in the life of animals, and especially 
 in Man. 
 
 It is love which causes, in the great majority of men, 
 the principal physiological and psychical expenditure of 
 the forces accumulated in larger or smaller quantities 
 by the consumption of daily bread, and which the daily 
 labor has not absorbed or which parasitic inaction has 
 left intact. 
 
 Even more—love is the only pleasure which truly has 
 a universal and equalitarian character. The people have 
 named it “the paradise of the poor;” and religions have 
 always bidden them to enjoy it without limits—“be 
 fruitful and multiply”—because the erotic exhaustion 
 which results from it, especially in males, diminishes or 
 hides beneath the pall of forgetfulness the tortures of 
 hunger and servile labor, and permanently enervates the 
 energy of the individual; and to this extent it performs 
 a function useful to the ruling class. 
 
 But indissolubly linked to this effect of the sexual in¬ 
 stinct there is an other, the increase of the population. 
 Hence it happens that the desire to eternize a given so- 
 
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 cial order is thwarted and defeated by the pressure of 
 this population which in our epoch assumes the charac¬ 
 teristic form of the proletariat ,—and the social evolution 
 continues its inexorable and inevitable forward march. 
 
 It follows from our discussion that while at the end 
 of the eighteenth century it was thought that Society 
 \ was made for the individual—and from that the deduc¬ 
 tion could be made that millions of individuals could 
 and ought to toil and suffer for the exclusive advantage 
 of a few individuals—at the end of our century the in¬ 
 ductive sciences have demonstrated, just the opposite, 
 that it is the individual who lives for the species and that 
 the latter is the only eternal reality of life. 
 
 There we have the starting-point of the sociological 
 or socialist tendency of modern scientific thought in the 
 face of the exaggerated individualism inherited from the 
 last century. 
 
 Modern biology also demonstrates that it is necessary 
 to avoid the opposite excess—into which certain schools 
 of utopian socialism and of communism fall—the ex¬ 
 cess of regarding only the interests of Society and al¬ 
 together neglecting the individual. An other biological 
 Taw shows us, in fact, that the existence of the aggregation 
 is the resultant of the life of all the individuals, just as 
 the existence of an individual is the resultant of the life 
 of its constituent cells. 
 
 We have demonstrated that the socialism which char¬ 
 acterizes the end of the nineteenth century and which 
 will illumine the dawn of the coming century is in per¬ 
 fect harmony with the entire current of modern thought. 
 This harmony manifests itself even on the fundamental 
 
 / 
 
 l l , 
 
— *3 — 
 
 question of the predominance given to the yital neces¬ 
 sity of collective or social solidarity over the dogmatic 
 exaggerations of individualism, and if the latter at the 
 close of the last century was the outward sign of a potent 
 and fruitful awakening, it inevitably leads, through the 
 pathological manifestations of unbridled competition, to 
 the “libertarian” explosions of anarchism which preaches 
 “individual action,” and which is entirely oblivious of 
 human and social solidarity. 
 
 We now come to the last point of contact and essen¬ 
 tial oneness that there is between Darwinism and social¬ 
 ism. 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE “STRUGGLE FOR LIFE” AND THE “CLASS-STRUGGLE.” 
 
 Darwinism has demonstrated that the entire mechan- 
 ism of animal evolution may be reduced to the strug¬ 
 gle for existence between individuals of the same species 
 on the one hand, and between each species and the whole 
 world of living beings. 
 
 In the same way all the machinery of social evolution 
 has been reduced by Marxian socialism to the law of the 
 Struggle between Classes. This theory not only gives us 
 the secret motive-power and the only scientific explana¬ 
 tion of the history of mankind; it also furnishes the ideal 
 and rigid standard of discipline for political socialism 
 and thus enables it to avoid all the elastic, vaporous, in¬ 
 conclusive uncertainties of sentimental socialism. 
 
 The only scientific explanation of the history of animal 
 life is to be found in the grand Darwinian law of the 
 struggle for existence; it alone enables us to determine 
 the natural causes of the appearance, development and 
 disappearance of vegetable and animal species from 
 paleontological times down to our own day. In the same 
 way the only explanation of the history of human life is 
 to be found in the grand Marxian law of the struggle 
 between classes; thanks to it the annals of primitive, bar¬ 
 barous and civilized humanity cease to be a capricious 
 and superficial kaleidoscopic arrangement of individual 
 
75 
 
 episodes in order to become a grand and inevitable drama, 
 determined—whether the actors realize it or not, in its 
 smallest internal details as well as in its catastrophes— 
 by the economic conditions, which form the indispensable, 
 physical basis of life and by the struggle between the 
 classes to obtain and keep control of the economic forces, 
 upon which all the others—political, juridical and 
 moral—necessarily depend. 
 
 I will have occasion to speak more at length—in study¬ 
 ing the relations between sociology and socialism—of this 
 grand conception, which is the imperishable glory of 
 Marx and which assures him in sociology the place which 
 Darwin occupies in biology and Spencer in philosophy . 1 
 ^For the moment it suffices for me to point out this 
 new point of contact between Socialism and Darwinism. 
 The expression, Class-Struggle, so repugnant when first 
 heard or seen (and I confess that it produced this im¬ 
 pression on me when I had not yet grasped the scientific 
 import of the Marxian theory), furnishes us, if it be 
 correctly understood, the primary law of human history 
 and, therefore, it alone can give us the certain index of 
 the advent of the new phase of evolution which Social¬ 
 ism foresees and which it strives to hasten. J 
 
 To assert the existence of the class-struggle is equi¬ 
 valent to saying that human society, like all other living 
 organisms, is not a homogeneous whole, the sum of a 
 greater or smaller number of individuals; it is, on the 
 contrary, a living organism which is made up of diverse 
 
 1 Lafargue, Le MaUrialisme tconomique, in Ere nouvelle, 
 1893. 
 
 
 iL 
 
parts, and their differentiation constantly increases in 
 direct ratio to the degree of social evolution attained. 
 
 Just as a. protozoon is almost wholly composed of al¬ 
 buminoid gelatine, while a mammal is composed of tissues 
 widely varying in kind, in the same way a tribe of primi¬ 
 tive savages, without a chief, is composed simply of a few 
 families and the aggregation is the result of mere ma¬ 
 terial propinquity, while a civilized society of the his¬ 
 torical or contemporaneous period is made up of social 
 classes which differ, the one from the other, either 
 through the physio-psychical constitutions of their com¬ 
 ponent members, or through the whole of their customs 
 and tendencies, and their personal, family or social life. 
 
 These different classes may be rigorously separated. 
 In ancient India they range from the brahman to the 
 sndra: in the Europe of the Middle Ages, from the Em¬ 
 peror and the Pope to the feudatory and the vassal, down 
 to the artisan, and an individual cannot pass from one 
 class into another, as his social condition is determined 
 solely by the hazard of birth. Classes may lose their 
 legal character, as happened in Europe and America after 
 the French Revolution, and exceptionally there may be an 
 instance of an individual passing from one class into an¬ 
 other, analogously to the endosmose and exosmose of 
 molecules, or, to use the phrase of M. Dumont, by a sort 
 of “social capillarity.” But, in any case, these different 
 classes exist as an assured reality and they resist every 
 juridical attempt at leveling as long as the fundamental 
 reason for their differentiation remains. 
 
 It is Karl Marx who, better than any one else* has 
 proved the truth of this theory by the mass of sociological 
 
77 
 
 observations which he has drawn from societies under 
 the most diverse economic conditions. 
 
 The names (of the classes), the circumstances and 
 phenomena of their hostile contact and conflict may vary 
 with the varying phases of social evolution, but the tragic 
 essence of history always appears in the antagonism be- 
 'tweeiPthose who hold the mom mol y«jof„ the means- of^ 
 production—and these are few—and those who have been 
 robbed (expropriated) of them—and these are the great 
 majority. 
 
 Warriors and shepherds in the primitive societies, as 
 soon as first, family and then individual ownership of 
 land has superseded the primitive collectivism; patricians 
 and plebeians—feudatories and vassals—nobles and com¬ 
 mon people—bourgeoisie and proletariat; these are so many 
 manifestations of one and the same fact—the monopoly 
 of wealth on one side, and productive labor on the other. 
 
 Now, the great importance of the Marxian law—the 
 struggle between classes—consists principally in the fact 
 that it indicates with great exactness just zvhat is in 
 truth the vital point of the social question and by what 
 method its solution may be reached. 
 
 As long as no one had shown on positive evidence the 
 economic basis of the political, juridical and moral life, 
 the aspirations of the great majority for the amelioration 
 of social conditions aimed vaguely at the demand and 
 the partial conquest of som e accessory i nstrumentality* 
 such as freedom of worship, political suffrage, public 
 education, etc. And certainly, I have no desire to deny 
 the great utility of these conquests. —" n " ■ 
 
 But the sancta sanctorum always remained impenetra- 
 
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 — 78 — 
 
 ble to the eyes of the masses, and as economic power 
 continued to he the privilege of a few, all the conquests 
 and all the concessions had no real basis, separated, as 
 they were, from the solid and fecund foundation which 
 alone can give life and abiding power. 
 
 Now, that Socialism has shown—even before Marx, but 
 never before with so much scientific precision—that in¬ 
 dividual ownership, private property in land and the 
 means of production is the vital point of the question— 
 the problem is formulated in exact terms in the con¬ 
 sciousness of contemporaneous humanity. 
 
 What method will it be necessary to employ in order 
 to abolish this monopoly of economic power, and the 
 mass of suffering and ills, of hate and injustice which 
 l flow from it ? 
 
 | The method of the Class Struggle, based on the scien¬ 
 tifically proven fact that every class tends to preserve 
 and increase its acquired advantages and privileges, 
 teaches the class deprived of economic power that in 
 order to succeed in conquering it, the struggle (we will 
 consider, further on, the forms of this struggle) must be 
 a struggle of class against class, and not of individual 
 against individual, j 
 
 Hatred toward such or such an individual—even if it 
 result in his death—does not advance us a single step 
 toward the solution of the problem; it rather retards its 
 solution, because it provokes a reaction in the general 
 feeling against personal violence and it violates the 
 principle of respect for the human person which socialism 
 proclaims most emphatically for the benefit of all and 
 against all opponents. The solution of the problem does 
 
not become easier because it is recognized that the pres¬ 
 ent abnormal condition, which is becoming more and 
 more acute—misery for the masses and pleasure for a 
 few—is not the consequence of the bad intentions of such- 
 or such an individual. 
 
 Viewed" from this side also socialism is, in fact, in per¬ 
 fect harmony with modern science, which denies the , 
 free will of man and sees in human activity, individual 
 and collective, a necessary effect whose determining 
 causes are the conditions of race and environment, acting 
 concurrently . 1 
 
 Crime, suicide, insanity, misery are not the fruits of \ 
 free will, of individual faults, as metaphysical spirtual- 
 
 ism believes, and neither is it an effect of free will, a fault 
 
 , 
 
 of the individual capitalist if the workingman is badly 
 paid, if he is without work, if he is poor and miserable. / 
 
 All social phenomena are the necessary resultants of 
 the historical conditions and of the environment. In 
 the modern world the facility and the greater frequency 
 of communication and relations of every kind between 
 _ 
 
 1 Avoiding both of the mutually exclusive theses that civili¬ 
 zation is a consequence of race or a product of the environ¬ 
 ment, I have always maintained—by my theory of the 
 natural factors in criminality—that it is the resultant of 
 the combined action of the race and the environment. 
 
 Among the recent works which support the thesis of the 
 exclusive or predominant influence of race, I must mention 
 Le Bon, Les lois psychologiques de revolution des peuples, 
 Paris, 1894. This work is, however, very superficial. I 
 refer the reader for a more thorough examination of these 
 two theses to Chap. IV of my book Omicidio ncll' anthropologia 
 criminate, Turin, 1894. 
 
80 
 
 c 
 
 all parts of the earth have also increased the dependence 
 of every fact—economic, political, juridical, ethical, 
 artistic or scientific—upon the most remote and appar¬ 
 ently unrelated conditions of the life of the great world. 
 
 The present organization of private property with no 
 restrictions upon the right of inheritance by descent or 
 upon personal accumulation; the ever increasing and 
 more perfect application of scientific discoveries to the 
 facilitation of human labor—the labor of adapting the 
 materials furnished by Nature to human needs; the tel¬ 
 egraph and the steam-engine, the constantly overflowing 
 torrent of human migrations—all these bind, with in¬ 
 visible but infrangible threads, the existence of a family 
 of peasants, work-people or petty trades-people to the 
 life of the whole world. And the harvest of coffee, cotton 
 or wheat in the most distant countries makes its effects 
 felt in all parts of the civilized world, just as the decrease 
 or increase of the sun-spots are phenomena co-incident 
 with the periodical agricultural crises and have a direct 
 influence on the destinies of millions of men. 
 
 This magnificent scientific conception of the “unity 
 of physical forces,” to use the expression of P. Secchi, 
 or of universal solidarity is far, indeed, from that infan¬ 
 tile conception which finds the causes of human phenom¬ 
 ena in the free wills of individuals. — 
 
 If a socialist were to attempt, even for philanthropic 
 purposes, to establish a factory in order to give work to 
 the unemployed, and if he were to produce articles out 
 of fashion or for which there was no general demand, he 
 would soon become bankrupt in spite of his philanthropic. 
 
 
 
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81 
 
 intentions by an inevitable effect of inexorable economic 
 laws. 
 
 Or, again, if a socialist should give the laborers in his 
 establishment wages two or three times as high as the 
 current rate of wages, he would evidently have the same 
 fate, since he would be dominated by the same economic 
 laws, and he would have to sell his commodities at a loss 
 or keep them unsold in his warehouses, because his prices 
 for the same qualities of goods would be above the mar¬ 
 ket price. 
 
 He would be declared a bankrupt and the only con¬ 
 solation the world would offer him would be to call him 
 an honest man (brave homme); and in the present phase 
 of “mercantile ethics“ we know what this expression 
 means . 1 
 
 ^Therefore, without regard to the personal relations, 
 more or less cordial, between capitalists and working¬ 
 men, their respective economic situations are inexorably 
 determined by the present (industrial) organization, in 
 accordance with the law of surplus-labor which enabled 
 Marx to explain and demonstrate irrefutably how the 
 capitalist is able to accumulate wealth without working, 
 —because the laborer produces in his day’s work an 
 
 1 1 use the expression “mercantile ethics,” which Letour- 
 neau used in his book on the Evolution of Ethics ( L’&vo - 
 lution de la morale), Paris, 1887. In his scientific study 
 of the facts relating to ethics, Letourneau has distinguished 
 four phases: animal ethics —savage ethics —barbarous ethics 
 —mercantile (or bourgeois) ethics; these phases will be fol¬ 
 lowed by a higher phase of ethics which Malon has called 
 social ethics. 
 
82 
 
 
 amount of wealth exceeding in value the wage he re¬ 
 ceives, and this surplus-product forms the gratuitous 
 (unearned) profit of the capitalist. Even if we deduct 
 from the total profits his pay for technical and adminis¬ 
 trative superintendence, this unearned surplus-product 
 still remains.jl 
 
 Land, abandoned to the sun and the rain, does not, of 
 itself, produce either wheat or wine. Minerals do not 
 come forth, unaided, from the bowels of the earth. A 
 bag of dollars shut up in a safe does not produce dollars, 
 as a cow produces calves. 
 
 | The production of wealth results only from a trans¬ 
 formation of (Nature-given) materials effected by human 
 labor. And it is only because the peasant tills the land, 
 because the miner extracts minerals, because the laborer 
 sets machinery in motion, because the chemist makes ex¬ 
 periments in his laboratory, because the engineer in¬ 
 vents machinery, etc., that the capitalist or the landlord 
 —though the wealth inherited from his father may have 
 cost him no labor, and though he may practise absentee¬ 
 ism and thus make no personal exertion—is able every 
 year to enjoy riches that others have produced for him, 
 in exchange for wretched lodgings and inadequate nour¬ 
 ishment—while the workers are, in most cases, poisoned 
 by the miasmatic vapors from rivers or marshes, by gas 
 in mines and by dust in factories—in brief, in exchange 
 for wages which are always inadequate to assure the 
 workers conditions of existence worthy of human crea¬ 
 tures. | 
 
 Even under a system of absolute metayage (share-farm¬ 
 ing)—which has been called a form of practical social- 
 
* 
 
 — 83 — 
 
 ism—we always have this question left unanswered. By 
 what miracle does the landlord, who does not work, get 
 his barns and houses filled with wheat and oil and wine 
 in sufficient quantities to enable him to live in ample 
 comfort, while the metayer (the tenant on shares) is 
 obliged to work every day, in order to wrest from the 
 earth enough to support himself and his family in 
 wretchedness? 
 
 And the system of metayage does at least give the ten¬ 
 ant the tranquillizing assurance that he will reach the 
 end of the year without experiencing all the horrors of 
 enforced idleness to which the ordinary day or wage 
 laborers are condemned in both city and country. But, 
 in substance, the whole problem in its entirety remains 
 unsolved (even under this system), and there is always 
 one man who lives in comfort, without working, because 
 ten others live poorly by working . 1 
 
 1 Some persons, still imbued with political (Jacobin) arti¬ 
 ficiality, think that in order to solve the social question 
 it will be necessary to generalize the system of metayage. 
 They imagine, then—though they do not say so—a royal or 
 presidential decree: “Art. 1. Let all men become metayers!” 
 
 And it does not occur to them that if m6tayage, which 
 was the rule, has become a less and less frequent exception, 
 this must be the necessary result of natural causes. 
 
 The cause of the transformation is to be found in the 
 fact that metayage represents (is a form typical of) petty 
 agricultural industry, and that it is unable to compete with 
 modern agricultural industry organized on a large scale 
 and well equipped with machinery, just as handicrafts have 
 not been able to endure competition with modern manu¬ 
 facturing industry. It is true that there still are to-day 
 
 
84 
 
 This is the way the system of private property works, 
 and these are the consequences it produces, without any 
 regard to the wills or wishes of individuals. 
 
 Therefore, every attempt made against such or such 
 an individual is condemned to remain barren of results; 
 it is the ruling tendency of Society, the objective point 
 which must be changed, it is private ownership which 
 must be abolished, not by a partition (“dividing up”), 
 which would result in the most extreme and pernicious 
 form of private ownership, since by the end of a year 
 the persistence of the old individualist principle would 
 restore the status quo ante , and all the advantage would 
 accrue solely to the most crafty and the least scrupulous. 
 | Our aim must be the abolition of private ownership 
 and the establishment of collective and social ownership 
 in land and the means of production. This substitution 
 cannot be the subject for a decree,—though the inten¬ 
 tion to effect it by a decree is attributed to us—but it is 
 in course of accomplishment under our eyes, every day, 
 from hour to hour, directly or indirectly. | 
 
 some handicraft industries in a few villages, but these are 
 rudimentary organs which merely represent an anterior 
 phase (of production), and which no longer have any im¬ 
 portant function in the economic world. They are, like 
 the rudimentary organs of the higher species of animals, 
 according to the theory of Darwin, permanent witnesses of 
 past epochs. 
 
 The same Darwinian and economic law applies to m&tayage , 
 which is also evidently destined to the same fate as handi¬ 
 crafts. 
 
 Conf. the excellent propagandist pamphlet of Biel, Af 
 contadini toscani, Colle d’ Elsa, 1894. 
 
85 
 
 Directly, because civilization shows us the continuous 
 substitution of public ownership and social functions 
 for private ownership and individual functions. Roads, 
 postal systems, railways, museums, city lighting-plants, 
 water-plants, schools, etc., which were only a few years 
 since private properties and functions, have become social 
 properties and functions. And it would be absurd to 
 imagine that this direct process of socialization is des¬ 
 tined to come to a halt to-day, instead of becoming 
 progressively more and more marked, in accordance with 
 every tendency of our modern life. 
 
 Indirectly, since it is the outcome, toward which the 
 economic individualism of the bourgeoisie tends. The 
 bourgeois class, which takes its name from the dwellers 
 in the bourgs (towns) which the feudal chateau and the 
 Church—symbols of the class then dominant—protected, 
 is the result of fecund labor intelligently directed to¬ 
 ward its goal and of historical conditions which have 
 changed the economic structure and tendency of the 
 world (the discovery of America, for instance). This 
 class achieved its revolution in the end of the eighteenth 
 century, and conquered the political power. In the his¬ 
 tory of the civilized world, it has inscribed a page in 
 letters of gold by those wondrous developments in the 
 lives of nations that are truly epic in character, and by 
 
 its marvelous applications of science to industry. 
 
 but it is now traversing the downward branch of the 
 parabola, and symptoms are appearing which announce 
 to us—and offer proof of their announcement—its dis¬ 
 solution; without its disappearance, moreover, the advent 
 
86 
 
 and establishment of a new social phase would he im¬ 
 possible. 
 
 Economic individualism carried out to its ultimate 
 logical consequences, necessarily causes the progressive 
 multiplication of property in hands of a constantly di- 
 
 ^ ^ i-n mu ' - Jw ^ ' rurV 'rr^ri —- t— r t» i *T ttt i - ii h 
 
 minishing number of persons. Milliardaire (billionaire) 
 is a new word, which is characteristic of the nineteenth 
 century, and this new word serves to express and empha¬ 
 size that phenomenon—in which Henry George saw the 
 historic law of individualism—of the rich becoming rich¬ 
 er while the poor become poorer . 1 
 
 Now it is evident that the smaller is the number of 
 those who hold possession of the land and the means of 
 production the easier is their expropriation—with or 
 without indemnification—for the benefit of a single pro¬ 
 prietor which is and can be Society alone. 
 
 Land is the physical basis of the social organism. It 
 is then absurd for it to belong to a few and not to the 
 whole social collectivity; it would not be any more ab¬ 
 surd for the air we breathe to be the monopoly of a few 
 ciirlords. 
 
 
 That (the socialization of the land and the means of 
 production) is truly the supreme goal of socialism, but 
 evidently it can not be reached by attacking such or such 
 a landlord, or such or such a capitalist. The individual¬ 
 ist mode of conflict is destined to remain barren of re¬ 
 sults, or, to say the least, it requires a terribly extrav- 
 
 
 1 Henry George, Progress and Poverty, New York, 1898. 
 Doubleday & McClure Co. 
 
87 
 
 agant expenditure of strength and efforts to obtain mere¬ 
 ly partial or provisional results. 
 
 And so those politicians, whose conception of states¬ 
 manship is a career of daily, trivial protests, who see 
 nothing in politics but a struggle between individuals— 
 and those tactics no longer produce any effect either on 
 the public or on legislative assemblies, because they have 
 at last become wonted to them—produce just about as 
 much effect as would fantastic champions of hygiene 
 who should attempt to render a marsh inhabitable by 
 killing the mosquitoes one by one with shots from a 
 revolver, instead of adopting as their method and their 
 goal the draining of the pestilential marsh. 
 
 No individual conflicts, no personal violence, hut a 
 Class Struggle. It is necessary to make the immense 
 armv of workers of all trades and of all professions 
 conscious of these fundamental truths. It is necessary 
 to show them that their class interests are in opposition 
 to the interests of the class who possess the economic 
 power, and that it is by class-conscious organization that 
 they will conquer this economic power through the 
 instrumentality of the other public powers that mod¬ 
 ern civilization has assured to free peoples. It may, 
 nevertheless, be foreseen that, in every country, the 
 ruling class, before yielding, will abridge or destroy even 
 these public liberties which were without danger for 
 them when they were in the hands of laborers not organ¬ 
 ized into a class-conscious party, but forming the rear¬ 
 guard of other purely political parties, as radical on 
 secondary questions as they are profoundly conservative 
 
88 
 
 on the fundamental question of the economic organiza¬ 
 tion of property. 
 
 A Class-Struggle, therefore a struggle of class against 
 class; and a struggle (this is understood), by the meth¬ 
 ods of which I will soon speak in discussing the four 
 modes of social transformation: evolution—revolution 
 —rebellion—individual violence. But a Class-Struggle 
 in the Darwinian sense, which renews in the history of 
 Man the magnificent drama of the struggle for life be¬ 
 tween species, instead of degrading us to the savage and 
 meaningless brute strife of individual with individual. 
 
 We can stop here. The examination of the relations 
 etween Darwinism and socialism might lead us much 
 further, but it would go on constantly eliminating the 
 pretended contradiction between the two currents of 
 modern scientific thought, and it would, on the contrary, 
 confirm the essential, natural and indissoluble harmony 
 that there is between them. 
 
 Thus the penetrating view of Virchow is confirmed 
 by that of Leopold Jacoby. 
 
 “The same year in which appeared Darwin’s book 
 (1859) and coming from a quite different direction, an 
 identical impulse was given to a very important develop¬ 
 ment of social science by a work which long passed un¬ 
 noticed, and which bore the title: Critique de Veconomie 
 politique by Karl Marx —it was the forerunner of 
 Capital. 
 
 “What Darwin’s book on the Origin of Species is on 
 the subject of the genesis and evolution of organic life 
 from non-sentient nature up to Man, the work of Marx 
 is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of associa- 
 
89 
 
 tion among human beings, of States and the social forms 
 of humanity.” * 1 
 
 And this is why Germany, which has been the most 
 fruitful field for the development of the Darwinian 
 theories, is also the most fruitful field for the intelligent, 
 systematic propaganda of socialist ideas. 
 
 And it is precisely for this reason that in Berlin, in 
 the windows of the book-stores of the socialist propa¬ 
 ganda, the works of Charles Darwin occupy the place of 
 honor beside those of Karl Mars, 2 
 
 1 L. Jacoby, L’Idea delV evoluzione, in Bibliotheca dell ’ eco- 
 nomista, s§rie III, vol. IX, 2d part, p. 69. 
 
 1 At the death of Darwin the Sozialdemokrat of the 27th of 
 April, 1882, wrote: “The proletariat who are struggling for 
 their emancipation will ever honor the memory of Charles 
 Darwin.” 
 
 Conf. Lafargue, La tMorie darwinienne. 
 
 I am well aware that in these last years, perhaps in con¬ 
 sequence of the relations between Darwinism and socialism, 
 consideration has again been given to the objections to the 
 theory of Darwin, made by Voegeli, and more recently by 
 Weismann, on the hereditary transmissibility of acquired 
 characters. See Spencer, The Inadequacy of Natural Selection, 
 Paris, 1894.— Virchow, Transformisme et descendance , Berlin, 
 1893. But all this merely concerns such or such a detail 
 of Darwinism, while the fundamental theory of metamorphic 
 
 organic development remains impregnable. 
 
PART SECOND. 
 
 EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 The theory of universal evolution which—apart from 
 such or such a more or less disputable detail—is truly 
 characteristic of the vital tendency of modern scientific 
 thought, has also been made to appear in absolute con¬ 
 tradiction with the theories and the practical ideals of 
 socialism. 
 
 In this case the fallacy is obvious. 
 
 If socialism is understood as that vague complex of 
 sentimental aspirations so often crystallized into the arti¬ 
 ficial utopian creations of a new human world to be sub¬ 
 stituted by some sort of magic in a single day for the old 
 world in which we live; then it is quite true that the 
 scientific theory of evolution condemns the presumptions 
 and the illusions of artificial or utopian political theories, 
 which, whether they are reactionary or revolutionary, 
 are always romantic, or in the words of the American 
 Senator Ingalls, are “iridescent dreams.” 
 
 But, unfortunately for our adversaries, contemporary 
 socialism is an entirely different thing from the social¬ 
 ism which preceded the work of Marx. Apart from the 
 same sentiment of protest against present injustices and 
 

 
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 91 — 
 
 the same aspirations toward a better future, there is 
 nothing in common between these two socialisms, neither 
 in their logical structure nor in their deductions, un¬ 
 less it be the (Sear vision, which in modern socialism be- 
 
 \ —ir “*—^—11 
 
 comes a mathematically exact prediction (thanks to the 
 theories of evolution) of the final social organization— 
 based on the collective ownership of the land and the 
 means of production. 
 
 These are the conclusions to which we are led by the 
 evidence of the facts—facts verified by a scientific exam¬ 
 ination of the three principal contradictions which our 
 opponents have sought to set up between socialism and 
 scientific evolution. 
 
 From this point it is impossible not to see the direct 
 causal connection between Marxian socialism and scien¬ 
 tific evolution, since it must be recognized that the 
 former is simply theological consequence of the applica¬ 
 tion of the evolutionary theory to the domain of eco¬ 
 nomics. 
 
 * 
 
 s *** s 
 
' \ 
 
 92 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE ORTHODOX THESIS AND THE SOCIALIST THESIS IN 
 THE LIGHT OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY. 
 
 What, in substance, is the message of socialism ? That 
 the present economic world can not be immutable and 
 eternal, that it merely represents a transitory phase of 
 social evolution and that an ulterior phase, a differently 
 organized world, is destined to succeed it. 
 
 That this new organization must be collectivist or 
 socialist—and no longer individualist—results, as an ul¬ 
 timate and certain conclusion, from the examination we 
 have made of Darwinism and socialism. 
 
 I must now demonstrate that this fundamental affirma¬ 
 tion of socialism—leaving out of consideration for the 
 moment all the details of that future organization, of 
 which I will speak further on—is in perfect harmony 
 with the experiential theory of evolutionism. 
 
 | Upon what point are orthodox political economy and 
 socialism in absolute conflict? Political economy has 
 held and holds that the economic laws governing the 
 production and distribution of wealth which it has estab¬ 
 lished are natural laws .... not in the sense that they 
 are laws naturally determined by the conditions of the 
 social organism (which would be correct), but that they 
 are absolute lazvs , that is to say that they apply to human- 
 
93 
 
 ity at all times and in all places, and, consequently, that 
 they are immutable in their principal points, though 
 they may be subject to modification in details. 1 ^ 
 
 Scientific socialism holds, on the contrary, that the 
 laws established by classical political economy, since the 
 time of Adam Smith, are laws peculiar to the present 
 period in the history of civilized humanity, and that they 
 are, consequently, laws essentially relative to the period 
 of their analysis and discovery, and that just as they no 
 longer fit the facts when the attempt is made to extend 
 their application to past historical epochs and, still more, 
 to pre-historic and ante-historic times, so it is absurd to 
 attempt to apply them to the future and thus vainly try 
 to petrify and perpetuate present social forms, j 
 
 Of these two fundamental theses, the orthodox thesis 
 and the socialist thesis, which is the one which best 
 agrees with the scientific theory of universal evolution? 
 
 The answer can not be doubtful. 2 
 
 Ihe theory of evolution, of which Herbert Spencer 
 was the true creator, by applying to sociology the tend¬ 
 ency to relativism which the historical school had fol¬ 
 lowed in its studies in law and political economy (even 
 then heterodox on more than one point), has shown that 
 everything changes; that the present phase—of the facts 
 in astronomy, geology, biology and sociology—is only 
 
 1 U. Rabbeno, Le leggi economiche e il socialismo, in Rivista 
 di filos. scicntif., 1884, vol. III., fasc. 5. 
 
 This is the thesis of Colajaniti, in II socialismo, Catane, 
 1884, P. 277. He errs when he thinks that I combatted this 
 position in my book Socialismo c criminalitd. 
 
the resultant of thousands on thousands of incessant, 
 inevitable, natural transformations; that the present dif¬ 
 fers from the past and that the future will certainly he 
 different from, the present. 
 
 Spencerism has done nothing hut to collate a vast 
 amount of scientific evidence, from all branches*of human 
 knowledge, in support of these two abstract thoughts 
 of Leibnitz and Hegel: “The present is the child of the 
 past, but it is the parent of the future/’ and “Nothing 
 is; everything is becoming.” This demonstration had 
 already been made in the case of geology by Lyell who 
 substituted for the traditional catastrophic theory of 
 cataclysmic changes, the scientific theory of the gradual 
 and continuous transformation of the earth. 1 
 
 It is true that, notwithstanding his encyclopaadic 
 knowledge, Herbert Spencer has not made a really pro¬ 
 found study of political economy, or that at least he has 
 * t 
 
 not furnished us the evidence of the facts to support his 
 assertions in this field as he has done in the natural 
 
 sciences. This does not alter the fact, however, that 
 socialism is, after all, in its fundamental conception 
 only the logical application of the scientific theory of 
 natural evolution to economic phenomena. 
 
 It was Karl Marx who, in 1859 in his Critique de Veco¬ 
 nomic politique, and even, before then, in 1847, in the 
 
 1 Morselli, Antropologia generate — Lezioni sulV uomo 
 secondo la teoria dell’ cvoluzione, Turin, 1890-94, gives an 
 excellent resumd of these general indications of modern 
 scientific thought in their application to all branches of 
 knowledge from geology to anthropology. 
 
95 
 
 famous Manifesto written in collaboration with Engels, 
 nearly ten years before Spencer’s First Principles, and 
 finally in Capital (1867) supplemented, or rather com¬ 
 pleted, in the social domain, the scientific revolution be¬ 
 gun by Darwin and Spencer. 
 
 The old metaphysics conceived of ethics—law—eco¬ 
 nomics—as.a finished compilation of absolute and eternal 
 laws. This is the conception of Plato. It takes into con¬ 
 sideration only historical times and it has, as an instru¬ 
 ment of research, only the fantastic logic of the school¬ 
 men. The generations which preceded us, have all been 
 imbued with this notion of the absoluteness of natural 
 laws, the conflicting laws of a dual universe of matter 
 and spirit. Modern science, on the contrary, starts from 
 the magnificent synthetic conception of monism, that is 
 to say, of a single substance underlying all phenomena 
 —matter and force being recognized as inseparable and 
 indestructible, continuously evolving in a succession of 
 forms—forms relative to their respective times and 
 places. It has radically changed the direction of modern 
 thought and directed it toward the grand idea of uni¬ 
 versal evolution. 1 
 
 Ethics, law and politics are mere superstructures, ef¬ 
 fects of the economic structure; they vary with its vari¬ 
 ations, from one parallel (of latitude or longitude) to an¬ 
 other, and from one century to another. 
 
 This is the great discovery which the genius of Karl 
 Marx has expounded in his Critique de Veconomic politique. 
 I will examine further on the question as to what this 
 
 1 Bonardi, Evoluzionismo e socialismo, Florence, 1894. 
 
96 
 
 sole source or basis of the varying economic conditions 
 is, but the important point now is to emphasize their 
 constant variability, from the pre-historic ages down to 
 historical times and to the different periods of the lat¬ 
 ter. 
 
 (Moral codes, religious creeds, juridical institutions 
 both civil and criminal, political organization:—all are 
 constantly undergoing transformation and all are rela¬ 
 tive to their respective historical and material environ¬ 
 ments. j 
 
 To slay one’s parents is the greatest of crimes in 
 Europe and America; it is, on the contrary, a duty en¬ 
 joined by religion in the island of Sumatra; in the same 
 way, cannibalism is a permitted usage in Central Africa, 
 and such it also was in Europe and America in pre¬ 
 historic ages. 
 
 The family is, at first (as among animals), only a sort 
 of sexual communism; then polyandry and the matri¬ 
 archal system were established where the supply of food 
 was scanty and permitted only a very limited increase 
 of population; we find polygamy and the patriarchal sys¬ 
 tem appearing whenever and wherever the tyranny of 
 this fundamental economic cause of polyandry ceases to 
 be felt; with the advent of historical times appears the 
 monogamic form of the family the best and the most 
 advanced form, although it is still requisite for it to be 
 freed from the rigid conventionalism of the indissoluble 
 tie and the disguised and legalized prostitution (the fruits 
 of economic causes) which pollute it among us to-day. 
 
 How can any one hold that the constitution of prop¬ 
 erty is bound to remain eternally just as it is, immutable, 
 
97 
 
 in the midst of the tremendous stream of changing so¬ 
 cial institutions and moral codes, all passing through 
 evolutions and continuous and profound transforma¬ 
 tions? Property alone is subject to no changes and will 
 remain petrified in its present form, i. e ., a monopoly by 
 a few of the land and the means of production! 1 
 
 ! This is the absurd contention of economic and juridical 
 orthodoxy. To the 'irresistible proofs and demonstra¬ 
 tions of the evolutionist theory, they make only this one 
 concession: the subordinate rules may vary, the abuses 
 may be diminished. The principle itself is unassailable 
 and a few individuals may seize upon and appropriate the 
 land and the means of production necessary to the life of 
 the whole social organism wdiich thus remains com¬ 
 pletely and eternally under the more or less direct domi¬ 
 nation of those who have control over the physical foun¬ 
 dation of life.^ 
 
 1 Arcaxgeli, Le evoluzioni della propriety, in Critica sociale, 
 July 1, 1894. 
 
 ’This is exactly analogous to the conflict between the 
 partisans and the opponents of free-will. 
 
 The old metaphysics accorded to man (alone, a marvelous 
 exception from all the rest of the universe) an absolutely 
 free will. 
 
 Modern physio-psychology absolutely denies every form 
 of the free-will dogma in the name of the laws of natural 
 causality. 
 
 An intermediate position is occupied by those who, while 
 recognizing that the freedom of man’s will is not absolute, 
 hold that at least a remnant of freedom must be conceded 
 to the human will, because otherwise there would no longer 
 
98 
 
 Nothing more than a perfectly clear statement of the 
 two fundamental theses—the thesis of classical law and 
 economics, and the economic and juridical thesis of so¬ 
 cialism—is necessary to determine, without further dis¬ 
 cussion, this first point of the controversy. At all events. 
 
 be any merit or any blameworthiness, any vice or any 
 virtue, etc. 
 
 I considered this question in my first work: Teoria dell* 
 imputabilitd e negazione del libero arbitrio (Florence, 1878, 
 out of print), and in the third chapter of my Sociologie 
 criminelle, French trans., Paris, 1892. 
 
 I speak of it here only in order to show the analogy in 
 the form of the debate on the economico-social question, 
 and therefore the possibility of predicting a similar ultimate 
 solution. 
 
 The true conservative, drawing his inspiration from the 
 metaphysical tradition, sticks to the old philosophical or 
 economic ideas with all their rigid absolutism; at least he 
 is logical. 
 
 The determinist, in the name of science, upholds diametri¬ 
 cally opposite ideas, in the domain of psychology as well 
 as in those of the economic or juridical sciences. 
 
 The eclectic, in politics as in psychology, in political 
 economy as in law, is a conservative through and through, 
 but he fondly hopes to escape the difficulties of the con¬ 
 servative position by making a few partial concessions to 
 save appearances. But if eclecticism is a convenient and 
 agreeable attitude for its champions, it is, like hybridism, 
 sterile, and neither life nor science owe anything to it. 
 
 Therefore, the socialists are logical when they contend 
 that in the last analysis there are only two political parties: 
 the individualists (conservatives [or Republicans], progres¬ 
 sives [or Democrats] and radicals [or Populists]) and the 
 socialists. 
 
99 
 
 the theory of evolution is in perfect, unquestionable har¬ 
 mony with the inductions of socialism and, or the con¬ 
 trary, it flatly contradicts the hypothesis of the absolute¬ 
 ness and immutability of the "natural” laws ol econom¬ 
 ics, etc. 
 
 
100 
 
 X. 
 
 THE LAW OF APPARENT RETROGRESSION AND COLLEC¬ 
 TIVE OWNERSHIP. 
 
 Admitting, say our adversaries, that in demanding a 
 ... social transformation socialism is in apparent accord with 
 the evolutionist theory, it does not follow that its positive 
 conclusions—notably the substitution of social owner¬ 
 ship for individual ownership—are justified by that the¬ 
 ory. Still further, they add, we maintain that those con¬ 
 clusions are in absolute contradiction with that very 
 theory, and that they are therefore, to say the least, 
 utopian and absurd. 
 
 The first alleged contradiction between socialism and 
 evolutionism is that the return to collective ownership 
 of the land would be, at the same time, a return to the 
 primitive, savage state of mankind, and socialism would 
 indeed he a transformation, hut a transformation in a 
 backward direction, that is to say, against the current of 
 the social evolution which has led us from the primitive 
 form of collective property in land to the present form 
 of individual property in land—the form characteristic 
 of advanced civilization. Socialism, then, would be a 
 return to barbarism. 
 
 This objection contains an element of truth which can 
 not be denied; it rightly points out that collective owner- 
 
 
101 
 
 ship would be a return—apparent—to the primitive so¬ 
 cial organization. But the conclusion drawn from this 
 truth is absolutely false and anti-scientific because it 
 altogether neglects a law—which is usually forgotten— 
 but which is no less true, no less founded on scientific 
 observation of the facts than is the law of social evolu¬ 
 tion. 
 
 This is a sociological law which an able French phy¬ 
 sician merely pointed out in his studies on the relations 
 between Transmutation and Socialism, 1 and the truth 
 and full importance of which I showed in my Sociologie 
 criminelle (1892)—before I became a militant socialist— 
 and which I again emphasized in my recent controversy 
 with Morselli on the subject of divorce. 2 
 
 This law of apparent retrogression proves that »the 
 reversion of social institutions to primitive forms and 
 types is a fact of constant recurrence. 
 
 Before referring to some obvious illustrations of this 
 law, I would recall to your notice the fact that M. 
 Cognetti de Martiis, as far back as 1881, had a vague 
 perception of this sociological law. His work, Forme 
 primitive nelP evoluzione economica, (Turin, 1881), so re¬ 
 markable for the fullness, accuracy and reliability of its 
 collation of relevant facts, made it possible to foresee 
 the possibility of the reappearance in the future economic 
 evolution of the primitive forms characteristic of the 
 
 1 L. Dramard, Transformisme et socialisms, in Revue Socia¬ 
 lists, Jan. and Feb., 1885. 
 
 2 Divorzio e sociologia, in Scuola positiva nella giurisprudenza 
 penale, Rome, 1893, No. 16. 
 
102 
 
 status which formed the starting-point of the social 
 evolution. 
 
 I also remember having heard Cardncci say, in his 
 lectures at the University of Bologna, that the later 
 development of the forms and the substance of literature 
 is often merely the reproduction of the forms and the 
 substance of the primitive Gragco-Oriental literature; in 
 the same way, the modern scientific theory of monism, 
 the very soul of universal evolution and the typical and 
 definitive form of systematic, scientific, experiential hu¬ 
 man thought boldly fronting the facts of the external 
 world—following upon the brilliant but erratic specula¬ 
 tions of metaphysics—is only a return to the ideas of the 
 Greek philosophers and of Lucretius, the great poet of 
 naturalism. 
 
 The examples of this reversion to primitive forms are 
 only too obvious and too numerous, even in the category 
 of social institutions. 
 
 I have already spoken of the religious evolution. 
 According to Hartmann, in the primitive stage of human 
 development happiness appeared attainable during the 
 lifetime of the individual; this appeared impossible later 
 on and its realization was referred to the life beyond the 
 tomb; and now the tendency is to refer its realization to 
 the earthly life of humanity, not to the life of the in¬ 
 dividual as in primitive times, but to series of generations 
 yet unborn. 
 
 The same is true in the political domain. Herbert 
 Spencer remarks (Principles of Sociology, Yol. II, Part 
 Y, Chap. Y,) that the will of all—the sovereign element 
 among primitive mankind—gradually gives way to the 
 
103 
 
 will of a single person, then to those of a few (these 
 are the various aristocracies: military, hereditary, profes¬ 
 sional or feudal), and the popular will finally tends again 
 to become sovereign with the progress of democracy 
 (universal suffrage—the referendum—direct legislation 
 by the people, etc.). 
 
 The right to administer punishment, a simple de¬ 
 fensive function among primitive mankind tends to be¬ 
 come the same once more. Criminal law no longer 
 pretends to be a teleological agency for the distribution 
 of ideal justice. This pretension in former days was an 
 illusion that the belief in the freedom of the will had 
 erected on the natural foundation of society’s right of 
 self-defense. Scientific investigations into the nature of 
 crime, as a natural and social phenomenon, have demon¬ 
 strated to-day how absurd and unjustified was the pre¬ 
 tension of the lawmaker and the judge to weigh and 
 measure the guilt of the delinquent to make the punish¬ 
 ment exactly counterbalance it, instead of contenting 
 themselves with excluding from civil society, temporarily 
 or permanently, the individuals unable to adapt them¬ 
 selves to its requirements, as is done in the case of the 
 insane and the victims of contagious diseases. 
 
 The same truth applies to marriage. The right of freely 
 dissolving the tie, which was recognized in primitive 
 society, has been gradually replaced by the absolute 
 formulae of theology and mysticism which fancy that the 
 “free will” can settle the destiny of a person by a mono¬ 
 syllable pronounced at a time when the physical equili¬ 
 brium is as unstable as it is during courtship and at 
 marriage. Later on the reversion to the spontaneous and 
 
104 
 
 primitive form of a union based on mutual consent im¬ 
 poses itself on men, and the matrimonial union, with the 
 increase in the frequency and facility of divorce, reverts 
 to its original forms and restores to the family, that is 
 to say to the social cell, a healthier constitution. 
 
 This same phenomenon may he traced in the organ¬ 
 ization of property. Spencer himself has been forced 
 to recognize that there has been an inexorable tendency 
 to a reversion to primitive collectivism since ownership 
 in land, at first a family attribute, then industrial, as 
 he has himself demonstrated, has reached its culminating 
 point, so that in some countries (Torrens act in Austra¬ 
 lia) land has become a sort of personal property, trans¬ 
 ferable as readily as a share in a stock-company. 
 
 "Read as proof what such an individualist as Herbert 
 Spencer has written: 
 
 “At first sight it seems fairly inferable that the ab¬ 
 solute ownership of land by private persons, must be the 
 ultimate state which industrialism brings about. But 
 though industrialism has thus far tended to individualize 
 possession of land, while individualizing all other posses¬ 
 sion, it may be doubted whether the final stage is at present 
 reached. Ownership established by force does not stand 
 on the same footing as ownership established by contract, 
 and though multiplied sales and purchases, treating the 
 two ownerships in the same way, have tacitly assimilated 
 them, the assimilation may eventually be denied. The 
 analogy furnished by assumed rights of possession over 
 human beings, helps us to recognize this possibility. 
 For while prisoners of war, taken by force and held as 
 property in a vague way (being at first much on a footing 
 
105 
 
 with, other members of a household), were reduced more 
 definitely to the form of property when the buying and 
 selling of slaves became general; and while it might, 
 centuries ago, have been thence inferred that the owner¬ 
 ship of man by man was an ownership in course of being 
 permanently established ; 1 yet we see that a later stage 
 of civilization, reversing this process, has destroyed 
 ownership of man by man. Similarly, at a stage still 
 more advanced,it may be that private ownership of land 
 zvill disappear ” 2 
 
 1 It is known that Aristotle, mistaking for an absolute 
 sociological law a law relative to his own time, declared 
 that slavery was a natural institution, and that men were 
 divided, by Nature, into two classes—free men and slaves. 
 
 2 Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. II, Part. V., Chap. 
 XV., p. 553. New York, 1897. D. Appleton & Co. 
 
 This idea, which Spencer had expressed in 1850 in his 
 Social Statics is found again in his recent work, Justice 
 (Chap. XI, and Appendix 3). It is true that he has made 
 a step backward. He thinks that the amount of the indem¬ 
 nity to be given to the present holders of the land would 
 be so great that this would make next to impossible that 
 “nationalization of the land” which, as long ago as 1881, 
 Henry George considered as the only remedy, and that 
 Gladstone had the courage to propose as a solution of the 
 Irish question. Spencer adds: “I adhere to the inference 
 originally drawn, that the aggregate of men forming the com¬ 
 munity are the supreme owners of the land, but a fuller con¬ 
 sideration of the matter has led me to the conclusion that 
 individual ownership, subject to State suzerainty, should 
 be maintained.” 
 
 The “profound study” which Spencer has made in Justice 
 —(and, let us say between parentheses, this work, together 
 with his “Positive and Negative Beneficence” furnishes sad 
 
106 
 
 Moreover, this process of the socialization of property, 
 though a partial and subordinate process, is nevertheless 
 so evident and continuous that to deny its existence 
 would be to maintain that the economic and conse¬ 
 quently the juridical tendency of the organization of 
 property is not in the direction of a greater and greater 
 magnification of the interests and rights of the collectiv¬ 
 ity over those of the individual. This, which is only a 
 preponderance to-day, will become by an inevitable 
 
 evidence of the senile mental retrogression that even Her¬ 
 bert Spencer has been unable to escape; moreover, its sub¬ 
 jective aridity is in strange contrast with the marvelous 
 wealth of scientific evidence poured forth in his earlier 
 works)—is based on these two arguments: I. The present 
 landed proprietors are not the direct descendants of the 
 first conquerors; they have, in general, acquired their titles 
 by free contract; II. Society is entitled to the ownership of 
 the virgin soil, as it was before it was cleared, before any 
 improvements or buildings were put upon it by private 
 owners; the indemnity which would have to be paid for 
 these improvements would reach an enormous figure. 
 
 The answer is that the first argument would hold good if 
 socialism proposed to punish the present owners; but the 
 question presents itself in a different form. Society places 
 the expropriation of the owners of land on the ground of 
 “public utility,” and the individual right must give way 
 before the rights of society, just as it does at present, 
 leaving out of consideration for the moment the question 
 of indemnity. To reply to the second argument, in the 
 first place, it must not be forgotten that the improvements 
 are not exclusively the work of the personal exertions of 
 the owners. They represent, at first, an enormous accumu¬ 
 lation of fatigue and blood that many generations of 
 
 i 1 
 
 
107 
 
 evolution a complete substitution as regards property 
 in land and the means of production. 
 
 The fundamental thesis of Socialism is then, to repeat 
 it again, in perfect harmony with that sociological law of 
 apparent retrogression, the natural reasons for which 
 have been so admirably analyzed by M. Loria, thus: 
 the thought and the life of primitive mankind are mould¬ 
 ed and directed by the natural environment along the 
 simplest and most fundamental lines; then the progress 
 
 laborers have left upon the soil, in order to bring it to its 
 present state of cultivation . . . and all this for the profit 
 of others; there is also this fact to be remembered that 
 society itself, the social life, has been a great factor in 
 producing these improvements (or increased values), since 
 public roads, railways, the use of machinery in agriculture, 
 etc., have been the means of bestowing freely upon the 
 landowners large unearned increments that have greatly 
 swollen the prices of their lands. 
 
 Why, finally, if we are to consider the amount and the 
 character of this indemnity, should this indemnity be total 
 and absolute? Why, even under present conditions, if a 
 landowner, for various reasons, such as cherished memories 
 connected with the land, values it at a sentimental price, 
 he would be forced under the right of eminent domain to 
 accept the market value, without any extra payment for his 
 affection or sentiment. It would be just the same in the 
 case of the collective appropriation which would, moreover, 
 be facilitated by the progressive concentration of the land 
 in the hands of a few great landed proprietors. If we were 
 to assure these proprietors, for the term of their natural lives, 
 a comfortable and tranquil life, it would suffice to make 
 the indemnity meet all the requirements of the most rigorous 
 equity. 
 
108 
 
 of intelligence and the complexity of life increasing by 
 a law of evolution give us an analytical development of 
 the principal elements contained in the first genus of 
 each institution; this analytical development is often, 
 when once finished, detrimental to each one of its ele¬ 
 ments; humanity itself, arrived at a certain stage of 
 evolution, reconstructs and combines in a final synthesis 
 these different elements, and thus returns to its primi¬ 
 tive starting-point . 1 
 
 This reversion to primitive forms is not, however, a 
 pure and simple repetition. Therefore it is called the 
 law of apparent retrogression, and this removes all force 
 from the objection that socialism would he a “return 
 to primitive barbarism” It is not a pure and simple 
 repetition, but it is the concluding phase of a cycle, of 
 a grand rhythm, as M. Asturaro recently put it, which 
 infallibly and inevitably preserves in their integrity the 
 achievements and conquests of the long preceding evolu¬ 
 tion, in so far as they are vital and fruitful; and the final 
 outcome is far superior, objectively and subjectively, to 
 the primitive social embryo. 
 
 1 Loria, La Teoria economica della constituzione politica, 
 Turin, 1886, p. 141. The second edition of this work has 
 appeared in French, considerably enlarged: Les bases eco - 
 nomiques de la constitution sociale, Paris, 1893. (This has also 
 been translated into English.—Tr.) 
 
 This law of apparent retrogression alone overthrows the 
 greater part of the far too superficial criticisms that Guyot 
 makes upon socialism in La Tyrannie socialiste, Paris, 1893 
 (published in English, by Swan Sonnenschein, London,) and in 
 Les Prmcipes de 1789 et le Socialisme , Paris, 1894 . 
 
109 
 
 The track of the social evolution is not represented 
 by a closed circle, which, like the serpent in the old 
 symbol, cuts off all hope of a better future; hut, to use 
 the figure of Goethe, it is represented by a spiral, which 
 seems to return upon itself, but which always advances 
 and ascends. 
 
THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY. 
 
 The conclusion of the preceding chapter will he of 
 use to us in the examination of the second contradiction 
 that, it is pretended, exists between socialism and the 
 theory of evolution. It is asserted and repeated in all 
 possible tones that socialism constitutes a tyranny under 
 a new form which will destroy all the blessings of liberty 
 won with such toil and difficulty in our century, at the 
 cost of so many sacrifices and of so many martyrs. 
 
 I have already shown, in speaking of anthropological 
 inequalities, that socialism will, on the contrary, assure 
 to all individuals the conditions of a human existence 
 and the possibility of developing with the utmost free¬ 
 dom and completeness their own respective individu¬ 
 alities. 
 
 It is sufficient here for me to refer to another law, 
 which the scientific theory of evolution has established, 
 to demonstrate (since I cannot in this monograph enter 
 into details) that it is an error to assume that the ad¬ 
 vent of socialism w r ould result in the suppression of the 
 vital and vitalizing part of personal and political liberty. 
 
 It is a law of natural ev olution, set forth and illus¬ 
 trated with remarkable clearness by M. Ardigo 1 , that 
 
 1 Ardig6, La formazione naturale, Vol. II. of his Opere 
 filosofiche, Padua, 1897. 
 
each succeeding phase of the natural and social evolution 
 does not destroy the vital and life-giving manifestations 
 of the preceding phases, but that, on the contrary, it 
 preserves their existence in so far as they are vital and 
 only eliminates their pathological manifestations. 
 
 In the biological evolution, the manifestations of veg¬ 
 etable life do not efface the first glimmerings of the 
 dawn of life that are seen even before in the crystalliza¬ 
 tion of minerals, any more than the manifestations of 
 animal life efface those of vegetable life. The human 
 form of life also permits the continued existence of the 
 forms and links which precede it in the great series of 
 living beings, but, more than this, the later forms only 
 really live in so far as they are the product of the 
 primitive forms and co-exist with them. 
 
 The sociaKevolution follows the same law: and this 
 is precisely the interpretation of transition periods given 
 by scientific evolutionism. They did not annihilate the 
 conquests of the preceding civilizations, but they pre¬ 
 served, on the contrary, whatever was vital in them and 
 fecundated them for the Renaissance of a new civiliza¬ 
 tion. 
 
 This law, which dominates all the magnificent de¬ 
 velopment of the social life, equally governs the fate 
 and the parabolic career of all social institutions. 
 
 One phase of social evolution by following upon an¬ 
 other phase eliminates, it is true, the parts that are not 
 vital, the pathological products of preceding institutions, 
 but it preserves and develops the parts that are healthy 
 and vigorous while ever elevating more and more the 
 physical and moral diapason of humanity. 
 
112 
 
 
 By this natural process the great stream of humanity 
 issued from the virgin forests of savage life and devel¬ 
 oped with majestic grandeur during the periods of bar¬ 
 barism and the present civilization, which are superior in 
 some respects to the preceding phases of the social life, 
 but in many others are marred by the very products of 
 their own degeneracy, as I pointed out in speaking of 
 reactionary varieties of social selection. 
 
 And, as an example of this, it is certain that the 
 laborers of the contemporaneous period, of the bourgeois 
 civilization have, in general, a better physical and moral 
 life than those of past centuries, but it cannot be de¬ 
 nied none the less that their condition as free wage¬ 
 workers is inferior in more than one particular to the 
 condition of the slaves of antiquity and of the serfs 
 of the Middle Ages. 
 
 The slave of antiquity was, it is true, the absolute 
 property of his master, of the free man, and he was 
 condemned to well nigh an animal existence, but it was 
 to the interest of his master to assure him daily bread 
 at the least, for the slave formed a part of his estate, 
 like his cattle and horses. 
 
 Just so, the serf or villein of the Middle Ages en¬ 
 joyed certain customary rights which attached him to 
 the soil and assured him at the least—save in case of 
 famine—of daily bread. 
 
 The free wage-worker of the modern world, on the 
 contrary, is always condemned to labor inhuman both in 
 its duration and its character, and this is the justification 
 of that demand for an Eight-Hours day which can al¬ 
 ready count more than one victory and which is destined 
 
113 
 
 to a sure triumph. As no permanent legal relation binds 
 the wage-slave either to the capitalist proprietor or to 
 the soil, his daily bread is not assured to him, because 
 the proprietor no longer has any interest to feed and 
 support the laborers who toil in his factory or on his 
 field. The death or sickness of the laborer cannot, in 
 fact, cause any decrease of his estate and he can always 
 draw from the inexhaustible multitude of laborers who 
 are forced by lack of employment to offer themselves on 
 the market. 
 
 That is why—not because present-day proprietors are 
 more wicked than those of former times, but because 
 even the moral sentiments are the result of economic 
 conditions—the landed proprietor or the superintendent 
 of his estate hastens to have a veterinary called if, in 
 his stable, a cow becomes ill, while he is in no hurry to 
 have a doctor called if it is the son of the cow-herd who 
 is attacked by disease. 
 
 { Certainly there may be—and these are more or less 
 requent exceptions—here and there a proprietor who 
 contradicts this rule, especially when he lives in daily con¬ 
 tact with his laborers. Neither can it be denied that the 
 rich classes are moved at times by the spirit of benev¬ 
 olence—even apart from the charity fad —and that they 
 thus put to rest the inner voice, the symptom of the 
 moral disease from which they suffer, but the inexorable 
 rule is nevertheless as follows: with the modern form of 
 industry the laborer has gained political liberty, the 
 right of suffrage, of association, etc. (rights which he 
 is allowed to use only when he does not utilize them 
 to form a class-party, based on intelligent apprehension 
 

 X3 
 
 Wk 
 
 V 
 
 \ 
 
 k 
 
 
 
 
 \ 
 
 V. 
 
 ' 
 
 114 — 
 
 
 of the essential point of the social question), hut he has 
 lost the guarantee of daily bread and of a home.| 
 
 Socialism wishes to give this guarantee to all indi¬ 
 viduals—and it demonstrates the mathematical possibil¬ 
 ity of this by the substitution of social ownership for 
 individual ownership of the means of production—but 
 it does not follow from this that socialism will do away 
 with all the useful and truly fruitful conquests of the 
 present phase of civilization, and of the preceding 
 phases. 
 
 | And here is a characteristic example of this: the inven¬ 
 tion of industrial and agricultural machinery, that mar¬ 
 velous application of science to the transformation of 
 natural forces which ought to have had only beneficent 
 consequences, has caused and is still causing the misery 
 and ruin of thousands and thousands of laborers. The 
 substitution of machines for human labor has inevitably 
 condemned multitudes of workers to the tortures of en¬ 
 forced idleness and to the ruthless action of the iron 
 law of minimum wages barely sufficient to prevent them 
 from dying of hunger.! 
 
 The first instinctive reaction or impulse of these un¬ 
 fortunates was and still is, unhappily, to destroy the 
 machines and to see in them only the instruments of their 
 undeserved sufferings. 
 
 But the destruction of the machines would be, in fact, 
 only a pure and simple return to barbarism, and that is 
 not the wish or purpose of socialism which represents 
 a higher phase of human civilization. 
 
 And this is why socialism alone can furnish a solu¬ 
 tion of this tragic difficulty which can not be solved by 
 
115 
 
 economic individualism which involves the constant em¬ 
 ployment and introduction of improved machinery be¬ 
 cause its use gives an evident and irresistible advantage 
 to the capitalist. 
 
 It is necessary—and there is no other solution—that 
 the machines become collective or social property. Then, 
 obviously, their only effect will be to diminish the ag¬ 
 gregate amount of labor and muscular effort necessary 
 to produce a given quantity of products. And thus the 
 daily work of each worker will be decreased, and his 
 standard of existence will constantly rise and become 
 more closely correspondent with the dignity of a human 
 being. 
 
 This effect is already manifest, to a limited extent, in 
 those cases where, for instance, several small farm propri¬ 
 etors found co-operative societies for the purchase of, 
 for example, threshing-machines. If there should be 
 joined to the small proprietors, in a grand fraternal co¬ 
 operation, the laborers or peasants (and this will be 
 possible only when the land shall have become social 
 property), and if the machines were municipal property, 
 for example, as are the fire-engines, and if the commune 
 were to grant their use for the labors of the fields, the 
 machines would no longer produce any evil effects and 
 all men would see in them their liberators. 
 
 It is thus that socialism, because it represents a higher 
 phase of human evolution, would eliminate from the pres¬ 
 ent phase only the bad products of our unbridled eco¬ 
 nomic individualism which creates, at one pole, the bil¬ 
 lionaires or “Napoleons of Finance” who enrich them¬ 
 selves in a few years by seizing upon—in ways more or 
 
116 
 
 I '|| «. 
 
 less clearly described in the penal code—the public 
 funds, and which, at the other pole, accumulates vast 
 multitudes of poverty-stricken wretches in the slums of 
 the cities or in the houses of straw and mud which repro¬ 
 duce in the South of Italy, the quarters of the Helots of 
 antiquity, or in the valley of the Po, the. huts of the 
 Australian bushmen . 1 
 
 { No intelligent socialist has ever dreamt of not recogniz¬ 
 ing all that the bourgeoisie has done for human civiliza¬ 
 tion, or of tearing out the pages of gold that it has 
 written in the history of the civilized world by its bril¬ 
 liant development of the various nations, by its marvel¬ 
 ous applications of science to industry, and by the com¬ 
 mercial and intellectual relations which it has devel¬ 
 oped between different peoples. / 
 
 These are permanent conquests of human progress, 
 and socialism does not deny them any more than it wishes 
 to destroy them, and it accords a just tribute of recogni¬ 
 tion to the generous pioneers who have achieved them. 
 The attitude of socialism toward the bourgeoisie might 
 be compared to that of atheists who do not wish either 
 to destroy or to refuse their admiration to a painting of 
 Raphael or to a statue of Michel-Angelo, because these 
 works represent and give the seal of eternity to religious 
 legends. 
 
 But socialism sees in the present bourgeois civilization, 
 arrived at its decline, the sad symptoms of an irremedi- 
 
 1 My master, Pietro Ellero, has given, in La Tirranide 
 borghese, an eloquent description of this social and political 
 pathology as it appears in Italy. 
 
able dissolution, and it contends that it is necessary to 
 rid the social organism of its infectious poison , and this 
 not by ridding it of such or such a bankrupt, of such or 
 such a corrupt official, of such or such a dishonest con¬ 
 tractor .... but by going to the root of the evil, to the 
 indisputable source of the virulent infection. By radi¬ 
 cally transforming the regime—through the substitution 
 of social ownership for individual ownership—it is neces¬ 
 sary to renew the healthy and vital forces of human so¬ 
 ciety, to enable it to rise to a higher phase of civilization. 
 Then, it is true, the privileged classes will no longer be 
 able to pass their lives in idleness, luxury and dissipation, 
 and they will have to make up their minds to lead an 
 industrious and less ostentatious life, but the immense 
 majority of men will rise to the heights of serene dig¬ 
 nity, security and joyous brotherhood, instead of living 
 in the sorrows, anxieties and bitter strife of the present. 
 
 An analogous response may be made to that banal ob¬ 
 jection that socialism will suppress all liberty—that ob¬ 
 jection repeated to satiety by all those who more or less 
 consciously conceal, under the colors of political liberal¬ 
 ism, the tendencies of economic conservatism. 
 
 VThat repugnance which many people, even in good 
 faith, show toward socialism, is it not the manifestation 
 of another law of human evolution which Herbert Spen¬ 
 cer has formulated thus: “Every progress effected is an 
 obstacle to further progress” ? j 
 
 This is, in fact, a natural psychological tendency, a 
 tendency analogous to fetishism, to refuse to consider 
 the ideal attained, the progress effected as a simple in¬ 
 strument, a starting-point for further progress and for 
 

 4 
 
 118 
 
 the attainment of new ideals, instead of contentedly halt¬ 
 ing to adore as a fetish the progress already effected, 
 which men are prone to look upon as being so complete 
 that it leaves no room for new ideals and higher aspira¬ 
 tions. 
 
 | Just as the savage adores the fruit-tree, whose bene¬ 
 fits he enjoys, for itself and not for the fruits it can 
 yield, and, in the end, makes a fetish of it, an idol too 
 holy to be touched and, therefore, barren; just as the 
 miser who has learned in our individualist world the 
 value of money, ends by adoring the money in itself and 
 for itself, as a fetish and an idol, and keeps it buried in 
 a safe where it remains sterile, instead of employing it 
 as a means for procuring himself new pleasures; in th^ 
 same way, the sincere liberal, the son of the French Rev 
 lution, has made Liberty an idol which is its own go: 
 a sterile fetish, instead of making use of it as an instr 
 ment for new conquests, for the realization of new idea 
 
 It is understood that under a regime of political 
 tyranny, the first and most urgent ideal was necessarily 
 the conquest of liberty and of political sovereignty. 
 
moral strength paralyzed as a consequence of bodily or 
 cerebral anemia ? 
 
 I Of what worth is the theoretic share in political sov¬ 
 ereignty. the right to vote, if the people remain enslaved 
 by misery, lack of employment, and acute or chronic, 
 hunger?) ~ 
 
 Liberty for liberty’s sake—there you have the progress 
 achieved turned into an obstacle to future progress; it 
 is a sort of political masturbation, it is impotency face 
 to face with the new necessities of life. 
 
 l x 
 
 | Socialism, on the other hand, says that just as the sub¬ 
 sequent phase of the social evolution does not efface the 
 conquests of the preceding phases, neither does it wish to 
 suppress the liberty so gloriously conquered by the bour¬ 
 geois world in 1789—but it does desire the laborers, after 
 they have become conscious of the interests and needs 
 of their class, to make use of that liberty to realize a 
 more equitable and more human social organization^ 
 
 \ Nevertheless, it is only too indisputable that under 
 the system of private property and its inevitable con¬ 
 sequence, the monopoly of economic power, the liberty of 
 the man who does not share in tins monopoly, is only an 
 impotent and sentimental toy. And when the workers, 
 with a clear consciousness of their class-interests, wish 
 to make use of this liberty, then the holders of political 
 power are forced to disown the great liberal principles, 
 “the principles of ’89,” by suppressing all public liberty, 
 and they vainly fancy that they will be able, in this way, 
 to stop the inevitable march of human evolution.) 
 
 As much must be said of another accusation made 
 
120 
 
 against socialists. They renounce their fatherland 
 (pa-trie), it is said, in the name of internationalism. 
 
 This also is false. 
 
 The national epopees which, in our century, have re¬ 
 conquered for Italy and Germany their unity and their 
 independence, have really constituted great steps for¬ 
 ward, and we are grateful to those who have given us a 
 free country. 
 
 But our country can not become an obstacle to future 
 progress, to the fraternity of all peoples, freed from 
 national hatreds which are truly a relic of barbarism, 
 or a mere bit of theatrical scenery to hide the interests of 
 capitalism which has been shrewd enough to realize, for 
 its own benefit, the broadest internationalism. 
 
 It was a true moral and social progress to rise above 
 the phase of the communal wars in Italy, and to feel our¬ 
 selves all brothers of one and the same nation; it will 
 be just the same when we shall have risen above the 
 phase of “patriotic” rivalries to feel ourselves all broth¬ 
 ers of one and the same humanity. 
 
 fit is, nevertheless, not difficult for us to penetrate, 
 thanks to the historical key of class-interests, the secret 
 of the contradictions, in which the classes in power move. 
 When they form an international league—the London 
 banker, thanks to telegraphy, is master of the markets in 
 Pekin, New York and St. Petersburg—it is greatlyto the 
 advantage of that ruling class to maintain the artificial 
 divisions between the laborers of the whole world, or 
 even those of old Europe alone, because it is only the 
 division of the workers which makes possible the main¬ 
 tenance of the power of the capitalists. And to attain 
 
121 
 
 their object, it suffices to exploit the primitive fund of 
 savage hatred for “foreigners.”^/ 
 
 But this does not keep international socialism from 
 being, even from this point of view, a definite moral 
 scheme and an inevitable phase of human evolution. 
 
 Just so, and in consequence of the same sociological 
 law, it is not correct to assert that, by establishing col¬ 
 lective ownership, socialism will suppress every kind of 
 individual ownership. 
 
 We must repeat again that one phase of evolution can 
 not suppress all that has been accomplished during the 
 preceding phases; it suppresses only the manifestations 
 which have ceased to be vital, and it suppresses them 
 because they are in contradiction with the new conditions 
 of existence begotten by the new phases of evolution. 
 
 In substituting social ownership for individual owner¬ 
 ship of the land and the means of production, it is ob¬ 
 vious that it will not be necessary to suppress private 
 property in the food necessary to the individual, nor in 
 clothing and objects of personal use which will continue' 
 to be objects of individual or family consumption. 
 
 This form of individual ownership will then always 
 continue to exist, since it is necessary and perfectly con¬ 
 sistent with social ownership of the land, mines, factories, 
 houses, machines, tools and instruments of labor, and 
 means of transportation. 
 
 The collective ownership of libraries—which we see 
 in operation under our eyes—does it deprive individuals 
 of the personal use of rare and expensive books which 
 they would be unable to procure in any other way, and 
 does it not largely increase the utility that can be de- 
 
122 
 
 rived from these books, when compared to the services 
 that these hooks could render if they were shut up in 
 the private library of a useless book-collector? In the 
 same way, the collective ownership of the land and the 
 means of production, by securing to everyone the use 
 of the machines, tools and land, will only increase their 
 utility a hundred-fold. 
 
 And let no one say that, when men shall no longer 
 have the exclusive and transferable (by inheritance, etc.) 
 ownership of wealth, they will no longer be impelled 
 to labor because they will no longer be constrained to 
 work by personal or family self-interest. 1 We see, for 
 example, that, even in our present individualist world, 
 those survivals of collective property in land—to which 
 Laveleye has so strikingly called the attention of socio¬ 
 logists—continue to be cultivated and yield a return 
 which is not lower than that yielded by lands held in pri¬ 
 vate ownership, although these communist or collectivist 
 farmers have only the right of use and enjoyment, and 
 not the absolute title. 2 
 
 1 Richter, Ou mene le socialisme, Paris, 1892. 
 
 * M. Loria, in Les Bases foonomiques de la constitution sociale, 
 Paris, 1894, part 1st, demonstrates, moreover, that in a 
 society based on collective ownership selfishness, rightly 
 understood will still remain the principal motive of human 
 actions, but that it will then be the means of realizing a 
 social harmony of which it is the worst enemy under the 
 regime of individualism. 
 
 Here is an example of this, on a small scale, but instruc¬ 
 tive. The means of transportation have, in large cities, 
 followed the ordinary process of progressive socialization. 
 
123 
 
 If some of these survivals of collective ownership are 
 disappearing, or if their administration is bad, this can 
 not be an argument against socialism, since it is easy to 
 understand that, in the present economic organization 
 based on absolute individualism, these organisms do not 
 have an environment which furnishes them the condi¬ 
 tions of a possible existence. 
 
 It is as though one were to wish a fish to live out of 
 water, or a mammal in an atmosphere containing no 
 oxygen. 
 
 These are the same considerations which condemn to 
 a certain death all those famous experiments—the so¬ 
 cialist, communist or anarchist colonies which it has been 
 attempted to establish in various places as “experimental 
 
 At first, everybody went on foot, excepting only a few rich 
 persons who were able to have horses and carriages; later, 
 carriages were made available for the public at a fixed rate 
 of hire (the fiacres which have been used in Paris a little 
 more than a century, and which took their name from 
 Saint Fiacre because the first cab stood beneath his image); 
 then, the dearness of fiacre -hire led to a further socializa¬ 
 tion by means of omnibuses and tramways. Another step 
 forward and the socialization will be complete. Let the cab 
 service, omnibus service, street railways, bicyclettes, etc., 
 become a municipal service or function and every one will 
 be able to make use of it gratis just as he freely enjoys the 
 electric light on the streets. It will be the same with the 
 railways when they become a national public service. 
 
 But, then—this is the individualist objection—everybody 
 will wish to ride in cabs or on trolleys, and the service 
 having to attempt to satisfy all, will be perfectly satisfactory 
 to no one. 
 
 This is not correct. If the transformation had to be 
 
124 
 
 trials of socialism.” It seems not to have been under¬ 
 stood that such experiments could only result in inevi¬ 
 table abortions, obliged as they are to develop in an in¬ 
 dividualist economic and moral environment which can 
 not furnish them the conditions essential for their phys¬ 
 iological development, conditions which they will, on the 
 contrary, have,,when the whole social organization shall 
 be guided by the collectivist principle, that is to say, 
 when society shall be socialised . * 1 
 
 Then individual tendencies and psychological apti¬ 
 tudes will adapt themselves to the environment. It is 
 natural that in an individualist environment, a world of 
 free competition, in which every individual sees in ev- 
 
 made suddenly, this might he a temporary consequence. 
 But even now many ride gratis (on passes, etc.) on both 
 railways and tramways. 
 
 And so it seems to us that every one will wish to ride 
 on the street cars because the fact that it is now impossible 
 for many to enjoy this mode of locomotion gives rise to the 
 desire for the forbidden fruit. But when the enjoyment of 
 it shall be free (and there could be restrictions based on 
 the necessity for such transportation) another egoistic 
 motive will come into play—the physiological need of walk¬ 
 ing, especially for well-fed people who have been engaged 
 in sedentary labor. 
 
 And so you see how individual selfishness, in this example 
 of collective ownership on a small scale, would act in har¬ 
 mony with the social requirements. 
 
 1 Thus it is easy to understand how unfounded is the 
 reasoning among the opponents of socialism that the failure 
 of communist or socialist colonies is an objective demon¬ 
 stration of “the instability of a socialist arrangement” (of 
 society). 
 
ery other if not an adversary, at least a competitor, anti¬ 
 social egoism should be the tendency which is inevitably 
 most highly developed, as a necessary result of the in¬ 
 stinct of self-preservation, especially in these latest 
 phases of a civilization which seems to be driven at full 
 steam, compared to the pacific and gentle individualism 
 of past centuries. 
 
 In an environment where every one, in exchange for 
 intellectual or manual labor furnished to society, will 
 be assured of his daily bread and will thus be saved from 
 daily anxiety, it is evident that egoism will have far fewer 
 stimulants, fewer occasions to manifest itself than sol¬ 
 idarity, sympathy and altruism will have. Then that 
 pitiless maxim —homo homini lupus —will cease to be true 
 —a maxim which, whether we admit it or not, poisons 
 so much of our present life. 
 
 I can not dwell longer on these details and I con¬ 
 clude here the examination of this second pretended op¬ 
 position between socialism and evolution by again point¬ 
 ing out that the sociological law which declares that the 
 subsequent phase (of social evolution) does not efface the 
 vital and fruitful manifestations of the preceding phases 
 of evolution, gives us, in regard to the social organization 
 in process of formation, a more exact (positive or fact- 
 founded) idea than our opponents think, who always 
 imagine that they have to refute the romantic and sen¬ 
 timental socialism of the first half of this century . 1 
 
 1 This is what Yves Guyot, for example, does in Lcs 
 Principes de 1789, Paris, 1894, when he declares, in the name 
 of individualist psychology, that “socialism is restrictive and 
 
126 
 
 This shows how little weight there is in the objection 
 recently raised against socialism, in the name of a learned 
 but vague sociological eclecticism, by a distinguished Ital¬ 
 ian professor, M. Yanni. 
 
 “Contemporary socialism is not identified with indi¬ 
 vidualism, since it places at the foundation of the social 
 organization a principle which is not that of individual 
 autonomy, but rather its negation. If, notwithstanding 
 
 individualism expansive.” This thesis is, moreover, in part 
 true, if it is transposed. 
 
 The vulgar psychology, which answers the purposes of 
 M. Guyot (La Tyrannie socialiste, liv. Ill, ch. I.), is content 
 with superficial observations. It declares, for instance, that 
 if the laborer works twelve hours, he will produce evidently 
 a third more than if he works eight hours, and this is the 
 reason why industrial capitalism has opposed and does 
 oppose the minimum programme of the three eighths— 
 eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep and eight hours 
 for meals and recreation. 
 
 A more scientific physio-psychological observation demon¬ 
 strates, on the contrary, as I said long ago, that “man is 
 a machine, but he does not function after the fashion of 
 a machine,” in the sense that man is a living machine, and 
 not an inorganic machine. 
 
 Every one knows that a locomotive or a sewing machine 
 does in twelve hours a quantity of work greater by one- 
 third than it does in eight hours; but man is a living 
 machine, subject to the laws of physical mechanics, but 
 also to those of biological mechanics. Intellectual labor, like 
 muscular labor, is not uniform in quality and intensity 
 throughout its duration. Within the individual limits of 
 fatigue and exhaustion, it obeys the law which Quetelet 
 expressed by his binomial curve, and which I believe to 
 be one of the fundamental laws of living and inorganic 
 
127 
 
 
 
 this, it promulgates individualist ideas, which are in con¬ 
 tradiction with its principles, this does not signify that 
 it has changed its nature, or that it has ceased to be 
 socialism: it means simply that it lives upon and by con¬ 
 tradictions . 1 
 
 When socialism, by assuring to every one the means 
 of livelihood, contends that it will permit the assertion 
 and the development of all individualities, it does not 
 
 fall into a contradiction of principles, but being, as it is, 
 
 - . --—— - 
 
 nature. At the start the force or the speed is very slight— 
 afterward a maximum of force or speed is attained—and 
 at last the force or speed again becomes very slight. 
 
 With manual labor, as with intellectual labor, there is a 
 maximum, after which the muscular and cerebral forces 
 decline, and then the w r ork drags along slowly and without 
 vigor until the end of the forced daily labor. Consider 
 also the beneficient suggestive influence of a reduction of 
 hours, and you will readily understand why the recent 
 English official reports are so unanswerable on the excellent 
 results, even from the capitalist point of view, of the Eight- 
 Hour reform. The workingmen are less fatigued, and the 
 production is undiminished. 
 
 When these economic reforms, and all those which are 
 based on an exact physio-psychology, shall be effected under 
 the socialist regime—that is to say, without the friction 
 and the loss of force that would be inevitable under capitalist 
 individualism—it is evident that they will have immense 
 material and moral advantages, notwithstanding the a 
 priori objections of the present individualism which can not 
 see or which forgets the profound reflex effects of a change 
 of the social environment on individual psychology. 
 
 1 Icilio Vanni, La funzione practica della filosofia del diritto 
 considerata in sd e in rapporto al socialismo contemporaneo, 
 Bologne, 1894. * 
 
 
the approaching phase of human civilization, it can not 
 suppress nor efface whatever is vital, that is to say, com¬ 
 patible with the new social form, in the preceding phases. 
 And just as socialist internationalism is not in conflict 
 with patriotism, since it recognizes whatever is healthy 
 and true in that sentiment, and eliminates only the path¬ 
 ological part, jingoism, in the same way, socialism does 
 not draw its life from contradiction, but it follows, on 
 the contrary, the fundamental laws of natural evolution, 
 in developing and preserving the vital part of individual¬ 
 ism, and in suppressing only its pathological manifesta¬ 
 tions which are responsible for the fact that in the mod¬ 
 ern world, as Prampolini said, 90 per cent, of the cells 
 cf the social organization are condemned to anemia be¬ 
 cause 10 per cent, are ill with hyper-emia and hyper¬ 
 trophy 
 
 I 
 
EVOLUTION—REVOLUTION—REBELLION—INDIVIDUAL 
 VIOLENCE—SOCIALISM AND ANARCHY. 
 
 The last and the gravest of the contradictions that it 
 is attempted to set up between socialism and the scientific 
 theory of evolution, relates to the question of how social¬ 
 ism, in practice, will be inaugurated and realized. 
 
 Some think that socialism ought, at the present time, 
 to set forth, in all its details, the precise and symmetrical 
 form of the future social organization.—“Show me a 
 practical description of the new society, and I will then 
 decide whether I ought to prefer it to the present so¬ 
 ciety.” 
 
 Others—and this is a consequence of that first false 
 conception—imagine that socialism wishes in a single 
 day to change the face of the world, and that we will be 
 able to go to sleep in a world completely bourgeois and to 
 wake up next morning in a world completely socialist. 
 
 How is it possible not to see, some one then says, that 
 all this is directly and thoroughly in conflict with the 
 law of evolution, a law based on the two fundamental 
 ideas—which are characteristic of the new tendencies of 
 scientific thought and which are in conflict with the old 
 metaphysics—of the naturalness and the gradualness of 
 1 all phenomena in all domains of universal life, from 
 astronomy to sociology. 
 
fit, p 
 
 
 
 
 Jf &4f^ &<*n**- - 
 
 ft 
 
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 — 130 — 
 
 £?•** 
 
 ■jt 
 
 
 4l 
 
 It is indisputable that these two objections were, in 
 great part, well founded when they were directed against 
 what Engels has called “utopian socialism ” 
 
 When socialism, before the time of Karl Marx, was 
 merely the sentimental expression of a humanitarianism 
 as noble as it was neglectful of the most elementary prin¬ 
 ciples of exact science, it was altogether natural for its 
 partisans to give rein to the impetuosity of their gen¬ 
 erous natures both in their vehement protests against 
 social injustices and in their reveries and day-dreams 
 of a better world, to which the imagination strove to give 
 precise contours, as witness all the utopias from the 
 Republic of Plato to the Looking Backward of 
 Bellamy. 
 
 It is easy to understand what opportunities these con¬ 
 structions afforded to criticism. The latter was false in 
 part, moreover, because it was the offspring of the habits 
 of thought peculiar to the modern world, and which will 
 change with the change in the environment, but it was 
 well founded in part also because the enormous com¬ 
 plexity of social phenomena makes it impossible to 
 prophesy in regard to all the details of a social organ¬ 
 ization which will differ from ours more profoundly than 
 the present society differs from that of the Middle Ages, 
 because the bourgeois world has retained the same found¬ 
 ation, individualism, as the society which preceded it, 
 while the socialist world will have a fundamentally dif¬ 
 ferent polarization. 
 
 These prophetic constructions of a new social order 
 are, moreover, the natural product of that artificiality 
 in politics and sociology, with which the most orthodox 
 
131 
 
 individualists are equally deeply imbued, individualists 
 who imagine, as Spencer has remarked, that human so¬ 
 ciety is like a piece of dough to which the law can give 
 one form rather than another, without taking into ac¬ 
 count the organic and psychical, ethical and historical 
 qualities, tendencies and aptitudes of the different peo¬ 
 ples. 
 
 Sentimental socialism has furnished some attempts 
 at utopian construction, but the modern world of politics 
 has presented and does present still more of them with 
 the ridiculous and chaotic mess of laws and codes which 
 surround every man from his birth to his death, and 
 even before he is born and after he is dead, in an in¬ 
 extricable network of codes, laws, decrees and regula¬ 
 tions which stifle him like the silk-worm in the cocoon. 
 
 And every day, experience shows us that our legisla¬ 
 tors, imbued with this political and social artificiality, 
 do nothing but copy the laws of the most dissimilar 
 peoples, according as the fashion comes from Paris or 
 Berlin,—instead of carefully studying the facts of actual 
 life, the conditions of existence and the interests of the 
 people in their respective countries, in order to adapt 
 their laws to them, laws which—if this is not done—re¬ 
 main, as abundant examples show, dead letters because 
 the reality of the facts of life does not permit them to 
 strike their roots into the social soil and to develop a 
 fruitful life. 1 
 
 1 We have a typical example of this in the new Italian 
 penal code, which, as I said before its enforcement, shows 
 no signs of special adaptation to Italian conditions. 
 
 It might just as well be a code made for Greece or Nor- 
 
On the subject of artificial social constructions, the 
 socialists might say to the individualists: let him who 
 is without sin, cast the first stone. 
 
 The true reply is wholly different. Scientific social¬ 
 ism represents a much more advanced phase of socialist 
 thought; it is in perfect harmony with modern, experien¬ 
 tial science, and it has completely abandoned the fan¬ 
 tastic idea of prophesying, at the present time, what 
 human society will be under the new collectivist organi¬ 
 zation. 
 
 What scientific socialism can affirm and does affirm 
 with mathematical certainty, is that the current, the 
 trajectory, of human evolution is in the general direction 
 pointed out and foreseen by socialism, that is to say, in 
 the direction of a continuously and progressively increas¬ 
 ing preponderance of the interests and importance of the 
 species over the interests and importance of the indi¬ 
 vidual—and, therefore, in the direction of a continuous 
 socialization of the economic life, and with and in con¬ 
 sequence of that, of the juridical, moral and political 
 life. 
 
 As to the petty details of the new social edifice, we are 
 unable to foresee them, precisely because the new social 
 edifice will be, and is, a natural and spontaneous product 
 of human evolution, a prdduct which is already in pro¬ 
 cess of formation, and the general outlines of which are 
 
 way, and it has borrowed from the countries of the north 
 the system of confinement in cells, which even then in the 
 north was recognized in all its costly absurdity as a system 
 devised for the brutalization of men. 
 
133 
 
 already visible, and not an artificial construction of the 
 imagination of some utopian or idealist. 
 
 The situation is the same in the social sciences and the 
 natural sciences. In embryology the celebrated law of 
 Haeckel tells us that the development of the individual 
 embryo reproduces in miniature the various forms of 
 development of the animal species which have preceded 
 it in the zoological series. But the biologist, by study¬ 
 ing a human embryo of a few days’ or a few weeks’ 
 growth, can not tell whether it will be male or female, 
 and still less whether it will be a strong or a weak in¬ 
 dividual, phlegmatic or nervous, intelligent or not. 
 
 He can only tell the general lines of the future evolu¬ 
 tion of that individual, and must leave it to time to show 
 the exact character of all the particular details of its 
 personality, which will be developed naturally and spon¬ 
 taneously, in conformity with the hereditary organic 
 conditions and the conditions of the environment in 
 which it will live. 
 
 This is what can be and what must be the reply of ev¬ 
 ery socialist. This is the position taken by Bebel in the 
 German Reichstag 1 in his reply to those who wish to 
 know at the present time what all the details of the 
 future State will be, and who skilfully profiting by the 
 ingenuity of the socialist romancers, criticize their arti¬ 
 ficial fantasies which are true in their general outlines, 
 but arbitrary in their details. 
 
 It would have been just the same thing if, before the 
 French Revolution,—which, as it were, hatched out the 
 
 1 Bebel, Zukunftstaat und Sozialdcmokratie, 1893. 
 
bourgeois world, prepared and matured during the pre¬ 
 vious evolution,—the nobility and the clergy, the classes 
 then in power, had asked the representatives of the Third 
 
 Estate—bourgeois by birth, though some aristocrats or 
 priests embraced the cause of the bourgeoisie against the 
 privileges of their caste, as the Marquis de Mirabeau and 
 the Abbe Sieyes—“But what sort of a world will this 
 % new world of yours be? Show us first its exact plan, 
 and after that we will decide!” 
 
 The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, would not have 
 been able to answer this question, because it was im¬ 
 possible for them to foresee what the human society of 
 the nineteenth century was to be. But this did not 
 prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking place be¬ 
 cause it represented the next natural and inevitable phase 
 of an eternal evolution. This is now the position of so¬ 
 cialism with relation to the bourgeois world. And if 
 this bourgeois world, born only about a century ago, is 
 destined to have a much shorter historical cycle than 
 the feudal (aristocratico-clerical) world, this is simply 
 because the marvelous scientific progress of the nine¬ 
 teenth century has increased a hundred-fold the rapidity 
 of life in time and has nearly annihilated space, and, 
 therefore, civilized humanity traverses now in ten years 
 the same road that it took, in the Middle Ages, a cen¬ 
 tury or two to travel. 
 
 The continuously accelerated velocity of human evolu¬ 
 tion is also one of the laws established and proved by 
 modern social science. 
 
 It is the artificial constructions of sentimental social- 
 
 t 
 
 ism which have given birth to the idea—correct so far 
 

 - 
 
 If 
 
 f 
 
 +*%0 f >* 
 
 u p> 
 
 / 
 
 ,/\ 
 
 as they are concerned—that socialism is synonymous with 
 ^ tyran ny. ' ■■ ■ », ..... „ , „ . . . n~ r 
 
 It is evident that if the new social organization is not 
 ( the spontaneous form naturally produced by the human 
 evolution, hut rather an artificial construction that has 
 issued complete in every detail from the brain of some 
 
 *V 
 
 social architect, the latter will be unable to avoid regu¬ 
 lating the new social machinery by an infinite number 
 of rules and by the superior authority which he will as¬ 
 sign to a controlling intelligence, either individual or 
 collective. It is easy to understand then, how such an 
 organization gives rise in its opponents—who see in the 
 indiv idualist world only the advantages of liberty, and 
 who forget the evils which so copiously flow from it__ 
 
 the impression of a system of monastic or military dis¬ 
 cipline. 1 
 
 Another contemporary artificial product has contri¬ 
 buted to confirm this impression —State Socialism. At 
 bottom, it does not differ from sentimental or utopian 
 socialism, and as Liebknecht said at the socialist con¬ 
 gress of Berlin (1892), it would be “a State Capitalism 
 which would join political slavery to economic exploita¬ 
 tion.^ State Socialism is a symptom of the irresistible 
 power of scientific and democratic socialism—as is shown 
 by the famous rescripts of Emperor William convoking 
 an international conference to solve (this is the infantile 
 idea of the decree) the problems of labor, and the famous 
 Encyclical on “The Condition of Labor” of the very able 
 
 3 It is this artificial socialism which Herbert Spencer 
 attacks. 
 
 ) . 
 
 JMsS 
 
 
 
 f? 
 
 ■> / / 
 
 
 f 1 
 if 
 
 V 
 
Pope, Leo XIII, who has handled the subject with great 
 tact and cleverness. 1 But these imperial rescripts and 
 these papal encyclicals—because it is impossible to leap 
 over or suppress the phases of the social evolution— 
 could only result abortively in our bourgeois, individual¬ 
 ist and laissez faire world. Certainly it would not have 
 been displeasing to this bourgeois world to see the vigor¬ 
 ous contemporary socialism strangled to death in the 
 amorous embraces of official artificiality and of State 
 Socialism, for it had become evident in Germany and 
 elsewhere, that neither laws nor repressive measures of 
 any kind could kill it. 2 f 
 
 All that arsenal of rules and regulations and provisions 
 for inspection and superintendence has nothing in com¬ 
 mon with scientific socialism which foresees clearly that 
 the executive guidance of the new social organization 
 ^yill be no more co nfused than is the present administra¬ 
 tion of the State, the provinces and the communes, and 
 _ 
 
 1 See “Socialism: a Reply to the Pope’s Encyclical,” by 
 Robert Blatchford. The International Publishing Co., New 
 York.—Tr. 
 
 2 To this State socialism apply most of the individualist 
 and anarchist objections of Spencer in “Man vs. State” 
 D. Appleton & Co., New York. 
 
 You will recall on this subject the celebrated debate be¬ 
 tween Spencer and Laveleye: “The State and the Individual 
 or Social Darwinism, and Christianity,” in the “Contem¬ 
 porary Review,” 1885. 
 
 Lafargue has also replied to Spencer, but has not pointed 
 out the fact that Spencer’s criticisms apply, not to demo¬ 
 cratic socialism, our socialism, but to State socialism. 
 
 See also Ciccotti on this subject. 
 

 
 — 137 — 
 
 will, on the contrary, he much better adapted to subserve 
 the interests of both society and the individual, since 
 it will be a natural product and not a parasitic product 
 of the new social organization. Just so, the nervous sys¬ 
 tem of a mammal is the regulating apparatus of its or¬ 
 ganism; it is, certainly, more complex than that of the 
 organism of a fish or of a mollusc, but it has not, for 
 that reason, tyrannically stifled the autonomy of the 
 other organs and anatomical machinery, or of the cells 
 in their living confederation. 
 
 | It is understood, then, that to refute socialism, some¬ 
 thing more is needed than the mere repetition of the 
 current objections against that artificial and sentimental 
 socialism which still continues to exist, I confess, in the 
 nebulous mass of popular ideas. But every day it is 
 losing ground before the intelligent partisans—working¬ 
 men, middle-class or aristocrats—of scientific socialism 
 which armed—thanks to the impulse received from the 
 genius of Marx—with all the best-established inductions 
 of modern science, is triumphing over the old objec¬ 
 tions which our adversaries, through force of mental 
 custom, still repeat, but which have long been left behind 
 by contemporary thought, together with the utopian so¬ 
 cialism which provoked them. J 
 
 The same reply must be made to the second part of the 
 objection, with regard to the mode by which the advent 
 of socialism will be accomplished. 
 
 One of the inevitable and logical consequences of 
 utopian and artificial socialism is to think that the archi¬ 
 tectonic construction proposed by such or such a re- 
 
former, ought to he and can be put into practice in a 
 single day by a decree. 
 
 In this sense it is quite true that the utopian illusion 
 of empirical socialism is in opposition to the scientific 
 law of evolution, and, looked at in this way , I combatted 
 it in my book on Socialismo e Criminalitd, because at that 
 time (1883) the ideas of scientific or Marxian socialism 
 were not yet generally disseminated in Italy. 
 
 A political party or a scientific theory are natural prod¬ 
 ucts which must pass through the vital phases of infancy 
 and youth, before reaching complete development. It 
 was, then, inevitable that, before becoming scientific or 
 positif (fact-founded), socialism, in Italy as in other 
 countries, should pass through the infantile phases of 
 clannish exclusiveness—the era when socialism was con¬ 
 fined to organizations of manual laborers—and of nebu¬ 
 lous romanticism which, as it gives to the word revolution 
 a narrow and incomplete meaning, is always fed with 
 false hope by the illusion that a social organism can be 
 radically changed in a single day with four rifle-shots, 
 just as a monarchical regime could thus be converted into 
 a republican regime. 
 
 \ But it is infinitely easier to change the political en¬ 
 velope of a social organization,—because such a change 
 has little effect on the economic foundation of the social 
 life,—than to completely revolutionize this social life in 
 its economic constitution. \ 
 
 The processes of social transformation, as well as— 
 under various names—those of every sort of transforma¬ 
 tion in living organisms are: evolution,—revolution,— 
 rebellion,—individual violence. 
 
139 
 
 A mineral or vegetable or animal species may pass 
 through, during the cycle of its existence, these four 
 processes. 
 
 As long as the structure and the volume of the centre 
 of crystallization, the germ, or the embryo, increase 
 gradually, we have a gradual and continuous process of 
 evolution , which must be followed at a definite stage by a 
 process of revolution, more or less prolonged, represented, 
 for example, by the separation of the entire crystal from 
 the mineral mass which surrounds it, or by certain revo¬ 
 lutionary phases of vegetable or animal life, as, for ex¬ 
 ample, the moment of sexual reproduction; there may 
 also be a period of rebellion, that is to say, of organized 
 personal violence, a frequent and w T ell-verified phenom¬ 
 enon among those species of animals who live in societies; 
 there may also be isolated instances of personal violence, 
 as in the struggles to obtain food or for possession of the 
 females between animals of the same species. 
 
 These same processes also occur in the human world. 
 By evolution must be understood the transformation that 
 takes place day by day, which is almost unnoticed, but 
 continuous and inevitable; by revolution, the critical and 
 decisive period, more or less prolonged, of an evolution 
 that has reached its concluding phase; by rebellion, the 
 partially collective violence which breaks out, upon the 
 occasion of some particular circumstance, at a definite 
 place and time; and by individual violence, the action of 
 one individual against one or several others, which may 
 be the effect of a fanatical passion or of criminal instincts, 
 or the manifestation of a lack of mental equilibrium,— 
 
140 
 
 and which identifies itself with the political or religious 
 ideas most in vogue at the moment. 
 
 It must be remarked, in the first place, that while revo¬ 
 lution and evolution are normal functions of social phys¬ 
 iology, rebellion and individual violence are symptoms of 
 social pathology. 
 
 These are, nevertheless, merely natural and spontane¬ 
 ous processes, since, as Virchow has shown, pathology is 
 merely the sequel of normal physiology. Besides, the 
 pathological symptoms have, or should have, a great 
 diagnostical value for the classes in power; but the lat¬ 
 ter, unfortunately, in every period of history, in times 
 of political crisis, as in those of social crisis, have shown 
 themselves unable to conceive of any other remedy than 
 brutal repression—the guillotine or the prison—and they 
 fancy that thus they can cure the organic and constitu¬ 
 tional disease which vexes the social body. 1 
 
 But it is indisputable, at all events, that the normal 
 processes of social transformation (and because they are 
 normal, the most fruitful and the surest, although the 
 slowest and the least effective in appearance) are evolu- 
 
 1 At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the 
 Italian edition of this work, M. Crispi had just proposed 
 the “exceptional laws for the public safety,” which, using 
 the outrages of the anarchists as a pretext, aimed by this 
 method to strike a blow at and to suppress socialism. 
 
 Repressive laws can suppress men, but not ideas. Has the 
 failure of the exceptional laws against the socialist party 
 in Germany been forgotten? 
 
 It is possible to increase the number of crimes, to sup¬ 
 press public liberties . . . but that is no remedy. Socialism 
 will continue its forward march just the same. 
 
141 
 
 tion and revolution, using the latter term in its accurate 
 and scientific sense, as the concluding phase of an evolu¬ 
 tion, and not in the current and incorrect sense of a 
 stormy and violent revolt. 1 
 
 It is evident, in fact, that Europe and America are, 
 in these closing years of the nineteenth century, in a 
 period of revolution, prepared by the evolution begotten 
 by the bourgeois organization itself and promoted by 
 utopian socialism as well as by scientific socialism. Like¬ 
 wise, we are in that period of social life which Bagehot 
 calls “the age of discussion,” 2 and already we can see 
 what Zola has called, in Germinal, the cracking of the 
 politico-social crust, and, in fact, all those symptoms 
 which Taine lias described in his VAncien Regime, in re¬ 
 lating the history of the twenty years which preceded 
 1780. As repressive methods are of no avail against do¬ 
 mestic revolution, and only serve to expose the symptoms, 
 there can be nothing efficacious and productive of good 
 results, except laws of social reform and preparation 
 which, while safe-guarding the present society, will ren¬ 
 der less painful, as Marx said, “the birth of the new so¬ 
 ciety.” 
 
 In this sense, evolution and revolution constitute the 
 most fruitful and surest processes of social metamor¬ 
 phosis. As human society forms a natural and living 
 organism, like all other organisms, it can not endure 
 
 1 Lombroso and Laschi, Le Crime politique, etc., and the 
 monograph of Elisee Reclus, Evolution et Revolution. 
 
 2 Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics. D. Appleton 
 & Co, 
 
142 
 
 sudden transformations, as those imagine who think 
 that recourse must he had only or by preference to rebel¬ 
 lion or personal violence to inaugurate a new social or¬ 
 ganization. This seems to me like imagining that a child 
 or a youth could, in a single day, accomplish a biological 
 evolution and become forthwith an adult. * 1 
 
 It is easv to understand how a man out of work, in the 
 horrors of starvation, his brain giving way for want of 
 nourishment, may fancy that by giving a policeman a 
 blow with his fist, by throwing a bomb, by raising a bar¬ 
 ricade, or by taking part in a riot, he is hastening the 
 realization of a social ideal, from which injustice will 
 have vanished. 
 
 And, even apart from such cases, it is possible to un¬ 
 derstand how the power of impulsive feeling, the dom¬ 
 inant factor in some natures, may, through a generous 
 impatience, lead them to make some real attempt—and 
 not imaginary like those which the police in all times 
 and all countries prosecute in the courts—to spread ter¬ 
 ror among those who feel the political or economic power 
 slipping from their hands. 
 
 But scientific socialism, especially in Germany, under 
 
 1 It is this lack of even elementary knowledge of geology, 
 biology, etc., which makes the vague ideal of anarchy so 
 attractive to many men of the people with really bright 
 minds, but with no scientific training, even though they 
 repudiate the employment of violent methods. 
 
 I In my opinion a more wide-spread instruction in the 
 natural sciences—together with their substitution for the 
 classics—would do more than any repressive laws to sup¬ 
 press the outrages of anarchy. \ 
 
143 
 
 the direct influence of Marxism, has completely aban¬ 
 doned those old methods of revolutionary romanticism. 
 Though they have often been employed, they have al¬ 
 ways resulted abortively, and for that very reason the 
 ruling classes no longer dread them, since they are only 
 light, localized assaults on a fortress which still has more 
 than sufficient resistant power to remain victorious and 
 by this victory to retard temporarily the evolution by 
 removing from the scene the strongest and boldest ad¬ 
 versaries of the status quo. 
 
 Marxian socialism is revolutionary in the scientific 
 meaning of the w T ord, and it is now developing into open 
 social revolution—no one will attempt to deny, I think, 
 that the close of the nineteenth century marks the crit¬ 
 ical phase of the bourgeois evolution rushing under a 
 full head of steam, even in Italy, along the road of in¬ 
 dividualist capitalism. 
 
 Marxian socialism has the candor to say, through the 
 mouths of its most authoritative spokesmen, to the great 
 suffering host of the modern proletariat, that it has no 
 magic wand to transform the world in a single day, as 
 one shifts the scenes in a theatre; it says on the contrary, 
 repeating the prophetic exhortation of Marx, “ Proleta¬ 
 rians of all countries, unite” that the social revolution 
 can not achieve its object, unless it first becomes a vivid 
 fact in the minds of the workers themselves by virtue 
 of the clear perception of their class-interests and of the 
 strength which their union will give them, and that they 
 will not wake up some day under a full-fledged socialist 
 regime, because divided and apathetic for 364 days out 
 of the year they shall rebel on the 365th, or devote them- 
 
144 
 
 selves to the perpetration of some deed of personal 
 violence. 
 
 This is what I call the psychology of the “gros lot” (the 
 capital prize in a lottery, etc.). Many workingmen imag¬ 
 ine, in fact, that—without doing anything to form them¬ 
 selves into a class-conscious party—they will win some 
 day the capital prize, the social revolution, just as the 
 manna is said to have come down from heaven to feed the 
 Hebrews. 
 
 Scientific socialism has pointed out that the trans¬ 
 forming power decreases as we descend the scale from 
 one process to another, that of revolution being less than 
 that of evolution, and that of rebellion being less than 
 that of revolution, and individual violence having the 
 least of all. And since it is a question of a complete trans¬ 
 formation of the entire social cosmos in its economic 
 foundation and, consequently, in its juridical, political 
 and ethical organization, the process of transformation 
 is more effective and better adapted to the purpose in 
 proportion as its social character predominates over its 
 individual character. 
 
 The individualist parties are individualists even in the 
 daily struggle; socialism, on the contrary, is collectivist 
 even in that, because it knows that the present organ¬ 
 ization does not depend upon the will of such or such 
 an individual, but upon society as a whole. And this is 
 also one reason why charity, however generous it be, 
 being necessarily personal and partial, can not be a rem¬ 
 edy for the social, and thereby collective, question of 
 the distribution of wealth. 
 
 In political questions, which leave the economico-social 
 
145 
 
 foundation untouched, it is possible to understand how, 
 for instance, the exile of Napoleon III. or of the Em¬ 
 peror Don Pedro could inaugurate a republic. But this 
 transformation does not extend to the foundation of the 
 social life, and the German Empire or the Italian Mon¬ 
 archy are, socially, bourgeois just the same as the French 
 Republic or the North American Republic, because not¬ 
 withstanding the political differences between them, they 
 all belong to the same economico-social phase. 
 
 This is why the processes of evolution and revolution 
 —the only wholly social or collective processes—are the 
 most efficacious, while partial rebellion and, still more, 
 individual violence have only a very feeble power of so¬ 
 cial transformation; they are, moreover, anti-social and 
 anti-human, because they re-awaken the primitive sav¬ 
 age instincts, and because they deny, in the very person 
 whom they strike down, the principle with which they 
 believe themselves animated—the principle of respect 
 for human life and of solidarity. 
 
 What is the use of hypnotizing oneself with phrases 
 about “the propaganda of the deed” and “immediate ac¬ 
 tion?” 
 
 It is known that anarchists, individualists, “amor- 
 phists” and “libertarians” admit as a means of social 
 transformation individual violence which extends from 
 homicide to theft or estampage, even among “compan¬ 
 ions;” and this is then merely a political coloring given 
 to criminal instincts which must not be confounded with 
 political fanaticism, which is a very different phenom¬ 
 enon, common to the extreme and romantic parties of 
 all times. A scientific examination of each case by itself, 
 
146 
 
 with the aid of anthropology and psychology, alone can 
 decide whether the perpetrator of snch or such a deed of 
 violence is a congenital criminal, a criminal through in¬ 
 sanity, or a criminal through stress of political fanati¬ 
 cism. 
 
 I have, in fact, always maintained, and I still maintain, 
 that the "political criminal,” whom some wish to class in 
 a special category, does not constitute a peculiar anthro¬ 
 pological variety, hut that he can be placed under one 
 or another of the anthropological categories of criminals 
 of ordinary law, and particularly one of these three: the 
 born criminal having a congenital tendency to crime, 
 the insane- criminal, the criminal by stress of fanatical 
 'passion. 
 
 The history of the past and of these latter times af¬ 
 ford us obvious illustrations of these several categories. 
 
 In the Middle Ages religious beliefs filled the minds of 
 all and colored the criminal or insane excesses of many 
 of the unbalanced. A similar insanity was the efficient 
 cause of the more or less hysterical "sanctity” of some of 
 the saints. At the close of our century it is the politico- 
 social questions which absorb (and with what overwhelm¬ 
 ing interest!) the universal consciousness-—which is 
 stimulated by that universal contagion created by jour¬ 
 nalism with its great sensationalism—and these are the 
 questions which color the criminal or insane excesses of 
 many of the unbalanced, or which are the determining 
 causes of instances of fanaticism occurring in men who 
 are thoroughly honorable, but afflicted with excessive 
 sensibility. 
 
 It is the most extreme form of these politico-social 
 
147 
 
 questions which, in each historical period, possesses the 
 most intense suggestive powder. In Italy sixty years ago 
 it was Mazzinnianisme or Carbonarisme; twenty years 
 ago, it was socialism; now it is anarchism. 
 
 It is very easy to understand how there occurred in 
 each period, in accordance with their respective domi¬ 
 nant tendencies, deeds of personal violence.... Felice 
 Orsini, for example, is one of the martyrs of the Italian 
 Revolution. 
 
 In each case of individual violence, unless one is con¬ 
 tent with the necessarily erroneous judgments begotten 
 by emotion, to reach a correct decision it is necessary 
 to make a physio-psychical examination of the perpe¬ 
 trator, just as it is in the case of any other crime. 
 
 Felice Orsini was a political criminal through passion. 
 Among the anarchist bomb-throwers or assassins of our 
 day may be found the born criminal—who simply colors 
 his congenital lack of the moral or social sense with a 
 political varnish—; the insane-criminal or mattoid 
 whose mental deficiency becomes blended with the po¬ 
 litical ideas of the period; and also the criminal through 
 political passion, acting from sincere conviction and 
 mentally almost normal, in whom the criminal action is 
 determined (or caused) solely by the false idea (which 
 socialism combats) of the possibility of effecting a social 
 transformation by means of individual violence. 1 
 
 But no matter whether the particular crime is that of 
 
 1 Hamon, Les Homines et les theories de Vanarchie, Paris, 
 1893.— Lombroso, Ultime scoperte ed applicazioni delV antro- 
 pologia criminate, Turin, 1893. 
 
a congenital criminal or of a madman or of a political 
 criminal through passion, it is none the less true that 
 personal violence, as adopted by the anarchist individual¬ 
 ists, is simply the logical product of individualism car¬ 
 ried to extremes and, therefore, the natural product of 
 the existing economic organization—though its produc¬ 
 tion is also favored by the “delirium of hunger,” acute 
 or chronic; but it is also the least efficacious and the 
 most anti-human means of social transformation . * 1 
 
 1 At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the 
 Italian edition of this book, the emotion had not yet sub¬ 
 sided which grew out of the harmless attack upon Crispi, 
 at Rome, on the 16th of June, and especially the much 
 keener emotion produced by the death of the President of 
 the French Republic, Sadi Carnot, on the 24th of June. 
 
 I reproduce here, as documentary evidence, the declaration 
 published by a section of the Socialist Party of Italian 
 Workers in the Secolo of the 27-28 June, and distributed by 
 thousands in Milan as a manifesto, and which was not men¬ 
 tioned by either the Conservative or the Progressive news¬ 
 papers, who tried by their silence to perpetuate the con¬ 
 fusion between socialism and anarchy. 
 
 Here is the declaration: 
 
 The Socialist Party to the Workingmen of Italy. —Down 
 with assassins! “Humanity now understands that life is 
 sacred, and does not tolerate brutal violations of this great 
 principle which is morally the soul of socialism.” 
 
 C. Prampolini. 
 
 “He who struggles for the right to life, in exchange for 
 his labor, condemns every assault upon human life,—whether 
 it be the work of bourgeois exploitation in factories, or of 
 the bombs or daggers of unintelligent revolutionists. 
 
 “The Socialist Party which has this principle for a shib¬ 
 boleth, which expects everything from the class-conscious 
 
149 
 
 But all anarchists are not individualists, amorphists 
 or autonomists; there are also anarchist-communists. 
 
 The latter repudiates deeds of personal violence, as or¬ 
 dinary means of social transformation (Merlino, for ex¬ 
 ample has recently stated this in his pamphlet: Necessitd e 
 base di an accordo, Prato, 1892), but even these an¬ 
 archist-communists cut themselves of from Marxian 
 socialism, both by their ultimate ideal and more especially 
 by their method of social transformation. They combat 
 
 organization of the working class, execrates the crime com¬ 
 mitted against the person of the President of the French 
 Republic, as a brutal deed, as the negation of every principle 
 of revolutionary logic. 
 
 “It is necessary to arouse in the proletariat the conscious¬ 
 ness of their own rights, to furnish them the structure of 
 organization, and to induce them to function as a new organ¬ 
 ism. It is necessary to conquer the public powers by the 
 means which modern civilization gives us. 
 
 “To revolt, to throw at haphazard a bomb among the 
 spectators in a theatre, or to kill an individual, is the act 
 of barbarians or of ignorant people. The Socialist Party 
 sees in such deeds the violent manifestation of bourgeois sen¬ 
 timents. 
 
 “We are the adversaries of all the violences of bourgeois 
 exploitation, of the guillotine, of musketry discharges 
 (aimed at strikers, etc.), and of anarchist outrages. Hurrah 
 for Socialism 7” 
 
 Socialism represses all these sterile and repugnant forms 
 of individual violence. 
 
 Carnot’s death accomplished nothing except to arouse a 
 transitory atavistic hatred of Italians. Afterward, the 
 French Republic elected another President and everything 
 was as before. The same may be said of Russia after the 
 assassination of Alexander II. 
 
150 
 
 Marxian socialism because it is law-abiding and parlia¬ 
 mentary, and they contend that the most efficacious and 
 the surest mode of social transformation is rebellion. 
 
 These assertions which respond to the vagueness of 
 the sentiments and ideas of too large portion of the 
 working-class and to the impatience provoked hy their 
 wretched condition, may meet with a temporary, unin¬ 
 telligent approval, but their effect can he only ephemeral. 
 The explosion of a bomb may indeed give birth to a 
 
 But the question may be regarded from another point of 
 view, which the conservatives, the progressives and the 
 radicals too completely forget. 
 
 The very day of these outrages two explosions of gas 
 took place, one in the mines of Karwinn (Austria), and the 
 other in the mines of Cardiff (England); the first caused the 
 death of 257 miners . . . , the second the death of 210!! 
 
 Although the death of an honorable man, like Carnot, may 
 be regretted, it is not to be compared to the mass of human 
 sufferings, misery and woe which fell upon these 467 work¬ 
 ing-class families, equally innocent as he. 
 
 It will be said, it is true, that the murder of Carnot was 
 the voluntary act of a fanatic, while no one directly killed 
 these 467 miners!—And certainly this is a difference. 
 
 But it must be remarked that if the death of these 467 
 miners is not directly the voluntary work of any one, it is 
 indirectly a result of individual capitalism, which, to swell 
 its revenues, reduces expenses to the lowest possible point, 
 does not curtail the hours of labor, and does not take all 
 the preventive measures indicated by science and sometimes 
 even enjoined by law, which is in such cases not respected, 
 for the justice of every country is as flexible to accommodate 
 the interests of the ruling class as it is rigid when applied 
 against the interests of the working-class. 
 
 If the mines were collectively owned, it is certain the 
 
 
151 
 
 momentary emotion, but it can not advance by the hun¬ 
 dredth part of an inch the evolution in men’s minds 
 toward socialism, while it causes a reaction in feeling, a 
 reaction in part sincere, but skilfully fomented and ex¬ 
 ploited as a pretext for repression. 
 
 To say to the laborers that, without having made ready 
 the requisite material means, but especiaTy without 
 solidarity and without an intelligent conception of the 
 goal and without a high moral purpose, they ought to 
 rise against the classes in power, is really to play into the 
 hands of those very classes, since the latter are sure of 
 the material victory when the evolution is not ripe and 
 the revolution is not ready. 1 
 
 And so it has been possible to show in the case of the 
 late Sicilian rebellion, in spite of all the lies of those 
 interested in hiding the truth, that in those districts 
 where socialism was most advanced and best understood 
 there were no deeds of personal violence, no revolts, as, 
 for example, among the peasants of Piana dei Greci, of 
 whom Nicola Barbato had made intelligent socialists; 
 while those convulsive movements occurred outside of 
 the held of the socialist propaganda as a rebellion against 
 
 owners would be less stingy about taking all the technical 
 preventive precautions (electric lighting, for instance), which 
 would diminish the number of these frightful catastrophes 
 which infinitely increase the anonymous multitude of the 
 martyrs of toil and which do not even trouble the digestion 
 of the share-holders in mining companies. 
 
 That is what the individualist regime gives us; all this 
 will be transformed by the socialist regime. 
 
 1 Rienzi, VAnarchisme; Deville, VAnarcMsme. 
 
V 
 
 — 152 — 
 
 the exactions of the local governments and of the ca- 
 morre / or in those districts where the socialist prop¬ 
 aganda was less intelligent and was stifled by the fierce 
 passions caused by hunger and misery. 1 2 
 
 History demonstrates that the countries where revolts 
 have been.the most frequent are those in which social 
 progress is the least advanced. The popular energies ex¬ 
 haust and destroy themselves in these feverish, convulsive 
 excesses, which alternate with periods of discouragement 
 and despair—which are the fitting environment of the 
 Buddhist theory of electoral abstention —a very con¬ 
 venient theory for the conservative parties. In such 
 countries we never see that continuity of premeditated 
 action, slower and less effective in appearance, but in 
 reality the only kind of action that can accomplish those 
 things which appear to us as the miracles of history. 
 
 Therefore Marxian socialism in all countries has pro¬ 
 claimed that from this time forth the principal means 
 of social transformation must be the conquest of the 
 public powers (in local administrations as well as in na¬ 
 tional Parliaments) as one of the results of the organiza¬ 
 tion of the laborers into a class-conscious party. The 
 further the political organization of the laborers, in 
 civilized countries, shall progress, the more one will see 
 realized, by a resistless evolution, the socialist organiza¬ 
 tion of society, at first by partial concessions, but ever 
 
 1 A. Rossi, VAgitazione in Sicilia, Milan, 1894. Colajanni, 
 In Sicilia, Rome, 1894. 
 
 2 The camorre were tyrannical secret societies that were 
 formerly prevalent and powerful in Italy.—Translator. 
 
153 
 
 growing more important, wrested from the capitalist 
 class by the working-class (the law restricting the work¬ 
 ing-day to Eight Honrs, for example), and then by the 
 complete transformation of individual ownership into so¬ 
 cial ownership. 
 
 As to the question whether this complete transforma¬ 
 tion, which is at present being prepared for by a process 
 of gradual evolution which is nearing the critical and 
 decisive period of the social revolution, can he ac¬ 
 complished without the aid of other means of trans¬ 
 formation—such as rebellion and individual violence'— 
 this is a question which no one can answer in advance. 
 Marxian socialists are not prophets, - 
 
 Our sincere wish is that the social revolution, when 
 its evolution shall be ripe, may be effected peacefully, 
 as so many other revolutions have been, without blood¬ 
 shed—like the English Revolution, which preceded by 
 a century, with its Bill of Rights , the French Revolu¬ 
 tion; like the Italian Revolution in Tuscany in 1859; 
 like the Brazilian Revolution, with the exile of the Em¬ 
 peror Dom Pedro, in 1892. 
 
 It is certain that socialism by spreading education and 
 culture among the people, by organizing the workers 
 into a class-conscious party under its banner, is only 
 increasing the probability of the fulfilment of our hope, 
 and is dissipating the old forebodings of a reaction after 
 the advent of socialism, which w r ere indeed justified when 
 socialism was still utopian in its means of realization in¬ 
 stead of being, as it now is, a natural and spontaneous, 
 and therefore inevitable and irrevocable, phase of the 
 evolution of humanity. 
 
 / 
 
 
154 
 
 Where will this social revolution start? I am firmly 
 convinced that if the Latin peoples, being Southerners, 
 are more ready for revolt, which may suffice for purely 
 political transformations, the peoples of the North, the 
 Germans and Anglo-Saxons are better prepared for the 
 tranquil and orderly but inexorable process of the true 
 revolution, understood as the critical phase of an organic, 
 incomplete, preparatory evolution, which is the only 
 effective process for a truly social transformation. 
 
 It is in Germany and England, where the greater de¬ 
 velopment of bourgeois industrialism inevitably ag¬ 
 gravates its detrimental consequences, and thereby mag¬ 
 nifies the necessity for socialism, that the great social 
 metarmorphosis will perhaps begin—though indeed it 
 has begun everywhere—and from there it will spread 
 across old Europe, just as at the close of the last century 
 the signal for the political and bourgeois revolution was 
 raised by France. 
 
 However this may be, we have just demonstrated once 
 more the profound difference there is between socialism 
 and anarchism—which our opponents and the servile 
 press endeavor to confound 1 and, at all events, I have 
 demonstrated that Marxian socialism is in harmony with 
 modern science and is its logical continuation. That 
 
 1 1 must recognize that one of the recent historians of 
 socialism, M. VAbb6 Winterer —more candid and honorable 
 than more than one Jesuitical journalist—distinguishes 
 always, in each country, the socialist movement from the 
 anarchist movement. 
 
 Winterer, le Socialisme contemporain, Paris, 1894, 2nd 
 edition. 
 
is exactly the reason why it has made the theory of 
 evolution the basis of its inductions and why it thu§ 
 marks the truly living and final phase—and, therefore, 
 the only phase recognized by the intelligence of the col¬ 
 lectivist democracy—of socialism which had theretofore 
 remained floating in the nebulosities of sentiment and 
 why it has taken as its guide the unerring compass of 
 scientific thought, rejuvenated by the works of Darwin 
 and Spencer. 
 
156 
 
 PART THIRD. 
 
 Sociology and Socialism. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY. 
 
 One of the 
 tific thought 
 
 the profound scientific revolution caused by Darwinism 
 and Spencerian evolution has reinvigorated with new 
 youth all the physical, biological and even psychological 
 sciences, when it reached the domain of the social 
 sciences, it only superficially rippled the tranquil and 
 orthodox surface of the lake of that social science par 
 excellence , political economy. 
 
 It has led, it is true, through the initiative of Auguste 
 Comte—whose name has been somewhat obscured by 
 those of Darwin and Spencer, but who was certainly one 
 of the greatest and most prolific geniuses of our age— 
 to the creation of a new science, Sociology , which should 
 
 strangest facts in the history of the scien- 
 of the nineteenth century is that, though 
 
157 
 
 be, together with the natural history of human societies, 
 the crowning glory of the new scientific edifice erected 
 hy the experimental method. 
 
 I do not deny that sociology, in the department of 
 purely descriptive anatomy of the social organism, has 
 made great and fruitful new contributions to contem¬ 
 porary science, even developing into some specialized 
 branches of sociology, of which criminal sociology , thanks 
 to the labors of the Italian school, has become one of 
 the most important results. 
 
 But when the politico-social question is entered upon, 
 the new science of sociology is overpowered hy a sort of 
 hypnotic sleep and remains suspended in a sterile, color¬ 
 less limbo, thus permitting sociologists to be in public 
 economy, as in politics, conservatives or radicals, in ac¬ 
 cordance with their respective whims or subjective 
 tendencies. 
 
 And while Darwinian biology, by the scientific de¬ 
 termination of the relations between the individual and 
 the species, and evolutionist sociology itself by describing 
 in human society the organs and the functions of a new 
 organism, was making the individual a cell in the animal 
 organism, Herbert Spencer was loudly proclaiming his 
 English individualism extending to the most absolute 
 theoretical anarchism. _ 
 
 A period of stagnation was inevitable in the scientific 
 productive activity of sociology, after the first original 
 observations in descriptive social anatomy and in the 
 natural history of human societies. Sociology repre¬ 
 sented thus a sort of arrested development in experi- 
 
 
mental scientific thought, because those who cutivated 
 it, wittingly or unwittingly, recoiled before the logical 
 and radical conclusions that the modern scientific revolu¬ 
 tion was destined to establish in the social domain— 
 the most important domain of all if science was to be¬ 
 come the handmaid of life, instead of contenting itself 
 with that barren formula, science for the sake of science. 
 
 The secret of this strange phenomenon consists not 
 only in the fact that, as Malagodi said, 1 sociology is still 
 in the period of scientific analysis and not yet in that of 
 synthesis , hut especially in the fact that the logical con¬ 
 sequences of Darwinism and of scientific evolutionism 
 applied to the study of human society lead inexorably 
 to socialism, as I have demonstrated in the foregoing 
 pages. 
 
 
 1 Malagodi, II Socialismo e la scienza, in Critica Sociale, 
 Aug. 1, 1892. 
 
159 
 
 XIV. 
 
 MARX COMPLETES DARWIN AND SPENCER. CONSERVA¬ 
 TIVES AND SOCIALISTS. 
 
 To Karl Marx is due the honor of having scientifically 
 formulated these logical applications of experiential 
 science to the domain of social economy. Beyond doubt, 
 the exposition of these truths is surrounded, in his 
 writings, with a multitude of technical details and of 
 apparently dogmatic formulae , but may not the same be 
 said of the First Principles of Spencer, and are not 
 the luminous passages on evolution in it surrounded with 
 a dense fog of abstractions on time, space, the unknow¬ 
 able, etc. ? Until these last few years a vain effort was 
 made to consign, by a conspiracy of silence, the masterly 
 work of Marx to oblivion, but now his name is coming 
 to rank with those of Charles Darwin and Herbert 
 Spencer as the three Titans of the scientific revolution 
 which begot the intellectual renaissance and gave fresh 
 potency to the civilizing thought of the latter half of 
 the nineteenth century. 
 
 The ideas by which the genius of Karl Marx completed 
 in the domain of social economy the revolution effected 
 by science are in number three. 
 
 The first is the discovery of the law of surplus-labor. 
 This law gives us a scientific explanation of the accumula- 
 
#JJL 
 
 
 
 
 — 160 — 
 
 tion of private property not created by the labor of the 
 accumulator; as this law has a more peculiarly technical 
 character, we will not lay further stress upon it here, 
 as we have given a general idea of it in the preceding 
 pages. 
 
 The two other Marxian theories are more directly re¬ 
 lated to our observations on scientific socialism, since 
 they undoubtedly furnish us the sure and infallible key 
 to the life of society. 
 
 I allude, first, to the idea expressed by Marx, as long 
 ago as 1859, in his Critique de Veconomie politique, that 
 the economic phenomena form the foundation and the 
 determining conditions of all other human or social 
 manifestations, and that, consequently, ethics, law and 
 politics are only derivative phenomena determined by the 
 economic factor, in accordance with the conditions of 
 each particular people in every phase of history and under 
 all climatic conditions. 
 
 This idea which corresponds to that great biological 
 law which states the dependence of the function on the 
 nature and capacities of the organ and which makes each 
 individual the result of the innate and acquired condi¬ 
 tions of his physiological organism, living in a given 
 environment, so that a biological application may be 
 •given to the famous saying: “Tell me what you eat and 
 1 will tell you what you are,”—this sublime idea which 
 unfolds before our eyes the majestic drama of history, 
 no longer as the arbitr ary t succession of great men o n 
 the stage pf the social theatre, but rather as the re¬ 
 sultant of the economic conditions of each people, this 
 sublime idea, after having been partially applied by 
 
161 
 
 Thorold Rogers 1 has been so brilliantly expounded and 
 illustrated by Achille Loria, 2 that I believe it unneces¬ 
 sary to say anything more about it. 
 
 One idea, however, still appears to me necessary to 
 complete this Marxian theory, as I remarked in the first 
 edition of my book: Socialismo e criminalita. 
 
 It is necessary, indeed, to rid this impregnable theory 
 of that species of narrow dogmatism with which it is 
 clothed in Marx and still more in Loria. 
 
 f— -i I ■ » 11 "" "MMH .I 
 
 It is perfectly true that every phenomenon, as well as 
 every institution—moral, juridical or political—is simply 
 the result of the economic phenomena and conditions 
 of the transitory physical and historical environment. 
 But, as a consequence of that law of natural causality 
 which tells us that every effect is always the resultant 
 of numerous concurrent causes and not of one cause 
 alone, and that every effect becomes in its turn a cause 
 of other phenomena, it is necessary to amend and com¬ 
 plete the too rigid form that has been given to this true 
 idea. 
 
 1 J. E. Tti. Rogers, The Economic Interpretation of His¬ 
 tory, London, 1888. 
 
 2 Loria, Les Bases cconomiques de la constitution sociale, 
 2nd edition, Paris, 1894. (This work is available in Eng¬ 
 lish under the title: “The Economic Foundations of So¬ 
 ciety.” Swan Sonnenschein, London.—Tr.) 
 
 To the general idea of Karl Marx, Loria adds a theory 
 about “the occupation of free land,” which is the fundamental 
 cause of the technical explanation of the different econo¬ 
 micro-social organizations, a theory which he has amply 
 demonstrated in his Analisi della propriety capitalistica, 
 Turin, 1892. 
 
162 
 
 Just as all the psychical manifestations of the in¬ 
 dividual are the resultant of the organic conditions 
 (temperament) and of the environment in which he lives, 
 in the same way, all the social manifestations—moral, 
 juridical or political—of a people are the resultant of 
 their organic conditions (race) and of the environment, 
 as these are the determining causes of the given economic 
 organization which is the physical basis of life. 
 
 ▼ m&s**** 
 
 In their turn, the individual psychical conditions be¬ 
 come causes and effect, although with less power, the 
 individual organic conditions and the issue of the strug¬ 
 gle for life. In the same way, the moral, juridical and 
 political institutions, from effects become causes (there 
 is, in fact, for modern science no substantial difference 
 between cause and effect, except that the effect is always 
 the latter of two related phenomena, and the cause al¬ 
 ways the former) and react in their turn, although with 
 less efficacy, on the economic conditions. 
 
 An individual who has studied the laws of hygiene 
 ay influence beneficently, for instance, the imperfec¬ 
 tions of his digestive apparatus, but always within the 
 very narrow limits of his organic capacities. A scientific 
 discovery, an electoral law may have an effect on in¬ 
 dustry or on the conditions of labor, but always within 
 limits fixed by the framework of the fundamental eco¬ 
 nomic organization. This is why moral, juridical and 
 political institutions have a greater influence on the re¬ 
 lations between the various subdivisions of the class con- 
 troling the economic power (capitalists, industrial mag¬ 
 nates, landed proprietors) than on the relations between 
 
 
 fir 
 
 L 
 
 I- 
 
 
 
163 
 
 the capitalist—property-owners on the one side and the 
 toilers on the other. 
 
 It suffices here for me to have mentioned this Marxian 
 law and I will refer to the suggestive book of Achille 
 Loria the reader who desires to see how this law scienti¬ 
 fically explains all the phenomena, from the most trivial 
 to the most imposing, of the social life. This law is 
 truly the most scientific and the most prolific sociological 
 theory that has ever been discovered by the genius of 
 man. It furnishes, as I have already remarked, a scien¬ 
 tific, physiological, experiential explanation of social his¬ 
 tory in the most magnificent dramas as well as of per¬ 
 sonal history in its most trivial episodes—an explana¬ 
 tion in perfect harmony with the entire trend—which 
 has been described as materialistic—of modern scientific 
 thought. 1 
 
 If we leave out of consideration the t wo u nscientific 
 explanations of free will and divine providence, we find 
 that two one-sided and therefore incomplete, although 
 correct and scientific, explanations of human history have 
 been given. I refer to the physical determinism of Mon¬ 
 tesquieu, Buckle and Metschnikoff, and to the anthropo- 
 
 1 It is seen what our judgment must be regarding the 
 thesis maintained by Ziegler, in his book: La question sociale 
 est une question morale (The social question is a moral ques¬ 
 tion). French trans., Paris, 1894. Just as psychology is an 
 effect of physiology, so the moral phenomena are effects of 
 the economic facts. Such hooks are only intended, more or 
 less consciously, to divert attention from the vital point of 
 the question, which is that formulated by Karl Marx. 
 
 See on our side, De Greef, VEmpirisme, Vutopi6 et le 
 socialisme scientiflque, Revue Socialiste, Aug., 1886, p. 688. 
 
logical determinism of the ethnologists who find the ex¬ 
 planation of the events of history in the organic and 
 psychical characteristics of the various races of men. 
 
 Karl Marx sums up, combines and completes these two 
 theories by his economic determinism. 
 
 The economic conditions—which are the resultant of 
 the ethnical energies and aptitudes acting in a given 
 physical environment—are the determining basis of all 
 the moral, juridical and political phenomenal manifesta¬ 
 tions of human life, both individual and social. 
 
 This is the sublime conception, the fact-founded and 
 scientific Marxian theory, which fears no criticism, rest¬ 
 ing as it does on the best established results of geology 
 and biology, of psychology and sociology. 
 
 It is thanks to it that students of the philosophy of 
 law and sociology are able to determine the true nature 
 and functions of the State which, as it is nothing but 
 “society juridica lly and po liticall y organized,” is only 
 the secular arm used by the class in possession ofthe" 
 economic power—and consequently of the political, 
 juridical and administrative power—to preserve their 
 own special privileges and to postpone as long as possible 
 the evil day when they must surrender them. 
 
 The other sociological theory by which Karl Marx has 
 truly dissipated the clouds which had ere then darkened 
 the sky of the aspirations of socialism, and which has 
 supplied scientific socialism with a political compass by 
 the use of which it can guide its course^with complete 
 confidence and certainty, in the struggles of every-day 
 
 

 <**-+ w 
 
 — 165 — 
 
 life, is the great historical law of c/ayx struggles. 1 ("The 
 history of all hitherto existing society is the history of 
 class struggles.” Communist Manifesto. Marx and En¬ 
 gels. 1848.) 
 
 rL, 
 
 If it is granted that the economic conditions of social 
 groups, like those of individuals, constitute the funda¬ 
 mental, determining cause of all the moral, juridical and 
 political phenomena, it is evident that every social group. 
 
 ^ every individual will be led to act in accordance with 
 hJL* its or his economic interest, because the latter is the 
 physical basis of life and the essential condition of all 
 dy 1 J other development. In the political sphere, each social 
 class will be inclined to pass laws, to establish institu¬ 
 tions and to perpetuate customs and beliefs which, di- 
 /y**? I rectly or indirectly subserve its interests. 
 
 These laws, these institutions, these beliefs, handed 
 down by inheritance or tradition, finally obscure or con¬ 
 ceal their economic origin, and philosophers and jurists 
 Let and often even the laity defend them as truths, subsisting 
 by virtue of their own intrinsic merits, without seeing 
 their real source, but the latter—the economic sub¬ 
 stratum—is none the less the only scientific explanation 
 of these laws, institutions and beliefs. And in this fact 
 
 1 As proof of that conspiracy of silence about the theories 
 of Karl Marx, it suffices for me to point out that the his¬ 
 torians of socialism generally mention only the technical 
 theory of surplus-labor, and ignore the two other laws: (1) 
 the determination of social phenomena and institutions by 
 economic conditions, and (2) the Class Struggle. 
 
 r 
 
 S! 
 
 f 
 
 
 MjU— 
 
' consists the greatness and strength of the perspicacious 
 conception of the genius of Marx. 1 
 
 As in the modern world there are now but two classes, 
 with subordinate varieties,—on the one side the workers 
 to whatever category they belong, and on the other the 
 property owners who do not work,—the socialist theory 
 of Marx leads us to this evident conclusion: since polit¬ 
 ical parties are merely the echoes and the mouth-pieces 
 of class interests—no matter what the subvarieties of 
 these classes may he—there can be substantially only two 
 political parties: the socialist labor party and the indi¬ 
 vidualist party of the class in possession of the land and 
 the other means of production. 
 
 The difference in the character of the economic mon¬ 
 opoly may cause, it is true, a certain diversity of political 
 color, and I have always contended that the great landed 
 proprietors represent the conservative tendencies of 
 political stagnation, while the holders of financial or 
 industrial capital represent in many instances the pro¬ 
 gressive party, driven by its own nature to petty innova¬ 
 tions of form, while finally those who possess only an 
 intellectual capital, the liberal professions, etc., may go 
 to the extreme length of political radicalism. 
 
 On the vital question—that is to say on the economic 
 question of property—conservatives, progressives and 
 
 1 The votes on measures imposing taxes in the legislative 
 bodies of all countries afford obvious illustrations of this 
 principle. (The alignment of forces in the struggle for the 
 income tax under the late administration of President Cleve¬ 
 land, is a very striking instance.—Tr.) 
 
167 
 
 radicals are all individualists. On this point they are 
 all, in their essential nature of the same social class and, 
 in spite of certain sentimental sympathies, the adversa¬ 
 ries of the working class and of those who, although 
 born on the other shore, have embraced the political 
 programme of that class, a programme necessarily cor¬ 
 responding to the primordial economic necessity—that 
 is to say, the socialization of the land and the means of 
 production with all the innumerable and radical moral, 
 juridical and political transformations, which this so¬ 
 cialization will inevitably bring to pass in the social 
 world. 
 
 This is why contemporary political life cannot but 
 degenerate into the most sterile byzantinisme and the 
 most corrupt strife for bribes and spoils, when it is con¬ 
 fined to the superficial skirmishes between individualist 
 parties, which differ only by a shade and in their formal 
 names, but whose ideas are so similar that one often sees 
 radicals and progressives less modern than many con¬ 
 servatives. 
 
 There will be a new birth of political life only with 
 the development of the socialist party, because, after the 
 disappearance from the political stage of the historical 
 figures of the patriots (the founders of modern Italy) 
 and of the personal reasons which split up the repre¬ 
 sentatives into different political groups, the formation 
 of one single individualist party will become necessary, 
 las I declared in the Italian Chamber on the 20th of 
 December, 1893. 
 
 The historical duel will then be begun, and the Class 
 Struggle will then display on the field of politics all its 
 
168 
 
 beneficent influence. Beneficent, I say, because the 
 class struggle must be understood not in the contempt¬ 
 ible sense of a Saturnalia of fist-fights and outrages, of 
 malevolence and personal violence, but must be worth¬ 
 ily conceived as a great social drama. With all my heart 
 I hope that this conflict may be settled, for the progress 
 of civilization, without bloody convulsions, but historical 
 destiny has decreed the conflict, and it is not given to us 
 or to others to avert or postpone it. 
 
 It follows from all that we have just said that these 
 ideas of political socialism, because they are scientific, 
 dispose their partisans both to personal tolerance and to 
 theoretical inflexibility. 1 2 This is also a conclusion reached 
 by experimental psychology in the domain of philosophy. 
 However great our personal sympathies may be for such 
 or such a representative of the radical faction of the 
 individualist party (as well as for every honorable and 
 sincere representative of any scientific, religious or polit¬ 
 ical opinion whatsoever), we are bound to recognize that 
 there are on the side of socialism no partiti afhnif It 
 is necessary to be on one side or the other—individualist 
 or socialist. There is no middle ground. And I am con¬ 
 stantly growing more and more convinced that the only 
 serviceable tactics for the formation of a socialist party 
 likely to live, is precisely that policy of theoretical in- 
 
 1 If uncompromisingness was an English word, it would 
 express the thought more clearly and strongly.—Tr. 
 
 2 Parties related by affinity of object, tactics, or, more 
 especially, of immediate demands.—Tr. 
 
 
169 
 
 flexibility and of refusing to enter into any “alliance” 
 v with par tit i afiini, as such an alliance is for socialism 
 ( only a “false placenta” for a fetus that is unlikely to 
 live. 
 
 The conservative and the socialist are the natural 
 products of the individual character and the social en¬ 
 vironment. One is born a conservative or an innovator 
 just as one is born a painter or a surgeon. Therefore 
 the socialists have no contempt for or bitterness toward 
 the sincere representatives of any faction of the conserva¬ 
 tive party, though they combat their ideas unrelentingly. 
 If such or such a socialist shows himself intolerant, if 
 he abuses his opponents, this is because he is the victim 
 Of a passing emotion or of an ill-balanced temperament; 
 it is, therefore, very excusable. 
 
 The thing that provokes a smile of pity is to see cer¬ 
 tain conservatives “young in years, but old in thought” 
 —for conservatism in the young can be nothing but the 
 effect of calculating selfishness or the index of psychical 
 anemia—have an air of complacency or of pity for so¬ 
 cialists whom they consider, at best, as “misled,” with¬ 
 out perceiving that what is normal is for the old to be 
 conservatives, but that young conservatives can be noth¬ 
 ing but egoists who are afraid of losing the life of idle 
 luxury into which they were born or the advantages 
 of the orthodox fashion of dividing (?) the fruits of labor. 
 Their hearts at least, if not their brains, are abnormally 
 small. The socialist, who has everything to lose and 
 nothing to gain by boldly declaring his position and 
 principles, possesses by contrast all the superiority of a 
 

 — 170 
 
 disinterested altruism, especially when having been born 
 in the aristocratic or the bourgeois class he has renounced 
 the brilliant pleasure of a life of leisure to defend the 
 cause of the weak and the oppressed. 1 
 
 But, it is said, these bourgeois socialists act in this 
 way through love of popularity! This is a strange form 
 of selfishness, at all events, which prefers to the quickly 
 reaped rewards and profits of bourgeois individualism, 
 “the socialist idealism” of popular sympathy, especially 
 when it might gain this sympathy by other means which 
 would compromise it less in the eyes of the class in 
 power. 
 
 Let us hope, in concluding, that when the bourgeoisie 
 shall have to surrender the economic power and the 
 political power in order that they may be used for the 
 benefit of all in the new society and that, as Berenini 
 recently said, victors and vanquished may really become 
 brothers without distinction of class in the common 
 assured enjoyment of a mode of life worthy of human 
 beings, let us hope that in surrendering power, the 
 bourgeoisie will do it with that dignity and self-respect 
 which the aristocracy showed when it was stripped of its 
 class privileges by the triumphant bourgeoisie at the 
 time of the French Revolution. 
 
 It is the truth of the message of socialism and its 
 perfect agreement with the most certain inductions of 
 experimental science which explain to us not only its 
 
 1 See the lectures of De Amicis, Osservazioni sulla questione 
 sociale, Lecce, 1894. Labriola, II Socialismo, Rome, 1890. 
 G. Oggero, II Socialismo, 2nd edition, Milan, 1894. 
 
— 171 — 
 
 tremendous growth and progress, which could not be 
 merely the purely negative effect of a material and moral 
 malady rendered acute by a period of social crisis, but 
 above all it explains to us that unity of intelligent, 
 disciplined, class-conscious solidarity which presents, in 
 the world-wide celebration of the first of May, a moral 
 phenomenon of such grandeur that human history pre¬ 
 sents no parallel example, if we except the movement 
 of primitive Christianity which had, however, a much 
 more restricted field of action than contemporary so¬ 
 cialism. 
 
 Henceforth—disregarding the hysterical or unreason¬ 
 ing attempts to revert from bourgeois scepticism to 
 mysticism as a safeguard against the moral and material 
 crisis of the present time, attempts which make us think 
 of those lascivious women who become pious bigots on 
 growing old 1 —henceforth both partisans and adversaries 
 of socialism are forced to recognize the fact that, like 
 Christianity at the dissolution of the Roman world, 
 
 1 There are, however, certain forms of this mysticism which 
 appeal to our sympathies very strongly. Such forms I will 
 call social mysticism. We may instance the works of Tolstoi, 
 who envelops his socialism with the doctrine of “non- 
 resistance to evil by violent means,” drawn from the 
 Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 Tolstoi is also an eloquent anti-militarist, and I am pleased 
 to see quoted in his book le Salut est en vou.s, Paris, 1894, a 
 passage from one of my lectures against war. 
 
 But he maintains a position aloof from contemporary 
 experimental scienee, and his work thus fails to reach the 
 mark. 
 
m 
 
 Socialism constitutes the only force which restores the 
 hope of a better future to the old and disintegrating 
 human society—a hope no longer begotten by a faith in¬ 
 spired by the unreasoning transports of sentiment, but 
 born of rational confidence in the inductions of modern 
 experimental science. 
 
 The End. 
 
173 
 
 APPENDIX V 
 
 Editor, etc. 
 
 Dear Sir: 
 
 I have read in your journal a letter from Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer in which he, relying on indirect information 
 conveyed to him, regarding my book, Socialism and Mod¬ 
 ern Science , expresses “his astonishment at the audacity 
 of him who has made use of his name to defend so¬ 
 cialism.” 
 
 Permit me to say to you that no socialist has ever 
 dreamt of making Mr. Spencer (who is certainly the 
 greatest of living philosophers) pass as a partisan of 
 socialism. It is strange, indeed, that anyone could have 
 been able to make him believe that there is in Italy 
 enough ignorance among writers as well as among read¬ 
 ers for one to misuse so grotesquely the name of Herbert 
 Spencer, whose extreme individualism is known to all 
 the world. 
 
 But the personal opinion of Herbert Spencer is a 
 quite different thing from the logical consequence of the 
 scientific theories concerning universal evolution, which 
 
 1 This appendix is a copy of a letter addressed by M. 
 Ferri to an Italian newspaper which had printed a letter 
 addressed by Herbert Spencer to M. Fiorentino. 
 
 
174 
 
 lie has developed more fully and better than anyone 
 else, but of which he has not the official monopoly and 
 whose free expansion by the labor of other thinkers he 
 can not inhibit. 
 
 I myself, in the preface of my book, pointed out that 
 Spencer and Darwin stopped half-way on the road to 
 the logical consequences of their doctrines. But I also 
 demonstrated that these very doctrines constituted the 
 cientific foundation of the socialism of Marx, the only 
 one who, by rising above the sentimental socialism of 
 former days, has arranged in a systematic and orderly 
 fashion the facts of the social economy, and by induction 
 drawn from them political conclusions in support of the 
 revolutionary method of tactics as a means of approach 
 to a revolutionary goal. 
 
 As regards Darwinism, being unable to repeat here 
 the arguments which are already contained in my book 
 and which will be more fully developed in the second 
 edition, it suffices for me to remind you—since it has 
 been thought tit to resort to arguments having so little 
 weight as appeals to the authority of individuals—that, 
 among many others, the celebrated Virchow foresaw, 
 with great penetration, that Darwinism would lead di¬ 
 rectly to socialism, and let me remind you that the 
 celebrated Wallace, Darwinian though he is, is a member 
 of the English League for the Nationalization of the 
 Land, which constitutes one of the fundamental con¬ 
 clusions of socialism . 1 
 
 1 Wallace lias advanced beyond this “half way house,” and 
 now calls himself a Socialist.—Tr. 
 
m 
 
 And, from another point of view, what is the famous 
 doctrine of “class-struggle" which Marx revealed as the 
 positive key of human history, but the Darwinian law of 
 the “struggle for life” transformed from a chaotic strife 
 between individuals to a conflict between collectivities? 
 
 Just the same as ever } 7 individual, every class or social 
 group struggles for its existence. And just as the bour¬ 
 geoisie struggled against the clergy and the aristocracy, 
 and triumphed in the French Revolution, in the same way 
 to-day the international proletariat struggles, and not by 
 the use of violence, as is constantly charged against us, 
 hut by propaganda and organization for its economic and 
 moral existence at present so ill assured and depressed 
 to so sadly low a plane. 
 
 As regards the theory of evolution, how can any one 
 not see that it most flagrantly contradicts the classical 
 theories of political economy, which looks upon the basic 
 laws of the existing economic organization as eternal 
 and immutable laws ? 
 
 Socialism, on the contrary, maintains that the eco¬ 
 nomic institutions and the juridical and political insti¬ 
 tutions are only the historical product of their particular 
 epoch, and that therefore they are changing, since they 
 are in a state of continuous evolution, which causes the 
 present to differ from the past, just as the future will be 
 different from the present. 
 
 Herbert Spencer believes that universal evolution 
 dominates over all orders of phenomena, with the excep¬ 
 tion of the organization of property, which he declares 
 is destined to exist eternally under its individualistic 
 form. The socialists, on the contrary, believe that the 
 
176 
 
 
 
 organization of property will inevitably undergo—just aa 
 all other institutions—a radical transformation, and, 
 taking into consideration its historical transformations, 
 they show that the economic evolution is marching and 
 will march faster and faster—as a consequence of the in¬ 
 creased evils of individualist concentration—toward its 
 goal, the complete socialization of the means of produc¬ 
 tion which constitute the physical basis of the social and 
 collective life, and which must not and can not therefore 
 remain in the hands of a few individuals. 
 
 Between these two doctrines it is not difficult to de¬ 
 cide which is the more in harmony with the scientific 
 theory of physical and social evolution. 
 
 In any case, with all the respect due to our intellectual 
 father, Herbert Spencer, but also with all the pride to 
 which my scientific studies and conscience give me the 
 right, I am content with having repelled the anathema 
 which Herbert Spencer—without having read my book 
 and on indirect and untrustworthy information—has 
 thought proper to hurl with such a dogmatic tone against 
 a scientific thesis which I have affirmed—not merely on 
 the strength of an ipse dixi (a mode of argument which 
 has had its day)—but which I have worked out and sup¬ 
 ported with arguments which have, up to this time, 
 awaited in vain a scientific refutation. 
 
 Enrico Ferri. 
 
 Rome, June, 1895. 
 
177 
 
 APPENDIX IL 1 
 
 SOCIALIST SUPERSTITION AND INDIVIDUALIST MYOPIA. 
 
 Among the numerous publications which, for or 
 against socialism, have appeared in Italy since my Socia - 
 lismo e scienza positivei 2 —which demonstrated the agree¬ 
 ment of socialism with the fundamental lines of contem¬ 
 porary scientific thought—the book of Baron Garofalo 
 was looked forward to with eager interest. It received at¬ 
 tention both because of the fame of the author and the 
 
 1 This appendix was written as a reply to a book by Baron 
 Garofalo, called La Superstition socialiste. This book made 
 quite a sensation in Italy and France, not on account of the 
 solidity of its arguments, but merely because Garofalo had 
 been associated with Lombroso and Ferri in founding the 
 modem school of criminology. As Garofalo’s book is prac¬ 
 tically unknown in this country, I have felt justified in 
 making many and large omissions from this appendix. 
 Gabriel Deville exposed the emptiness of Garofalo’s preten¬ 
 tious book in a most brilliant open letter to the Baron, 
 which appeared in Le Soeialiste for the 15th of Sept., 1895. 
 —Tr. 
 
 2 The present work, which appeared in Italian in 1894, in 
 French in 1895, and in Spanish in Madrid and Buenos-Ayres 
 in 1895. It now appears in English for the first time. 
 
178 
 
 open and radical disagreement which its publication 
 made manifest in the ranks of the founders of the school 
 of positive criminology, formerly united in such close 
 bonds in the propaganda and defense of the new science 
 —criminal anthropology and sociology—created by M. 
 Lombroso. 
 
 It is true that the scientific union between the found¬ 
 ers of the new Italian school of criminology formed an 
 alliance, but they were never in perfect unison. 
 
 M. Lombroso gave to the study of crime as a natural 
 and social phenomenon the initial impulse, and brilliantly 
 supported the correctness of this conception by his fruit¬ 
 ful anthropological and biological investigations. I con¬ 
 tributed the systematic, theoretical treatment of the 
 problem of human responsibility, and my psychological 
 and sociological studies enabled me to classify the nat¬ 
 ural causes of crime and the anthropological categories 
 of criminals. I showed the predominant role of social 
 prevention—quite a different thing from police preven¬ 
 tion—of criminality, and demonstrated the infinitesimal 
 influence of repression, which is always violent and only 
 acts after the mischief has been done. 
 
 M. Garofalo—though he was in accord with us on the 
 subject of the diagnosis of criminal pathology—con¬ 
 tributed nevertheless a current of ideas peculiar to him¬ 
 self, ideas more metaphysical and less heterodox; such, 
 for instance, as the idea that the anomaly shown by the 
 criminal is only a “moral anomaly;” that religion has 
 a preventive influence on criminality; that severe re¬ 
 pression is, at all events, the effective remedy; that misery 
 (poverty) is not only not the sole and exclusive factor 
 
179 
 
 in producing crime (which I always maintained and still 
 maintain), but that it has no determining influence on 
 crime; and that popular education, instead of being a 
 preventive means, is, on the contrary, an incentive, etc. 
 
 These ideas, in evident disagreement with the induc¬ 
 tions of biology and of criminal psychology and sociology 
 —as I have elsewhere demonstrated—nevertheless did 
 not prevent harmony among the positivists of the new 
 school. In fact, these personal and antiquated concep¬ 
 tions of M. Garofalo passed almost unnoticed. His ac¬ 
 tion was especially notable by reason of the greater im¬ 
 portance and development he gave to the purely juridical 
 inductions of the new school, which he systematized 
 into a plan of reforms in criminal law and procedure. 
 He was the jurist of the new school, M. Lombroso was 
 the anthropologist, and I the sociologist. 
 
 But while in Lombroso and myself the progressive and 
 heterodox tendency—extending even to socialism—be¬ 
 came more and more marked, it could already be fore¬ 
 seen that in M. Garofalo the orthodox and reactionary 
 tendencies would prevail, thus leading us away from 
 that common ground on which we have fought side by 
 side, and might still so fight. For I do not believe that 
 these disagreements concerning the social future must 
 necessarily prevent our agreement on the more limited 
 field of the present diagnosis of a phenomenon of social 
 pathology. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
After the explanation of this personal matter, we must 
 now examine the contents of this “Superstition socialiste,” 
 in order to see, in this schism of the scientific criminol¬ 
 ogists, which side has followed most systematically the 
 method of experimental science, and traced with the 
 most rigorous exactness the trajectory of human evolu¬ 
 tion. 
 
 / 
 
 We must see who is the more scientific, he who in car¬ 
 rying the experimental science beyond the narrow con¬ 
 fines of criminal anthropology and applying it in the 
 broad field of social science, accepts all the logical con¬ 
 sequences of scientific observations and gives his open 
 adherence to Marxian socialism—or he who while being 
 a positivist and innovator in one special branch of sci¬ 
 ence, remains a conservative in the other branches, to 
 which he refuses to apply the positive method, and which 
 he does not study with a critical spirit, but in which he 
 contents himself with the easy and superficial repetition 
 of trite commonplaces. 
 
 To those familiar with the former work of the author, 
 this book, from the first page to the last, presents a 
 striking contrast between M. Garofalo, the heterodox 
 criminologist ever ready to criticize with penetration 
 classical criminology, always in revolt against the thread¬ 
 bare commonplaces of juridical tradition, and M. Garo¬ 
 falo, the anti-socialist, the orthodox sociologist, the con¬ 
 servative follower of tradition, who finds that all is well 
 in the world of to-day. He who distinguished himself 
 before by the tone of his publications, always serene and 
 dignified, now permits us to think, that he is less con¬ 
 vinced of the correctness of his position than he would 
 
 
 ¥ 
 
 V 
 
 
181 
 
 have us believe, and to cover up this deficiency of con¬ 
 viction screams and shouts at the top of his voice. 
 
 For instance, on page 17, in a style which is neither 
 aristocratic nor bourgeois, he writes that “Bebel had the 
 impudence to defend the Commune in a public session 
 of the Reichstag;” and he forgets that the Commune of 
 Paris is not to be judged historically by relying solely 
 upon the revolting impressions left upon the mind by 
 the artificial and exaggerated accounts of the bourgeois 
 press of that time. Malon and Marx have shown by 
 indisputable documentary evidence and on impregnable 
 historical grounds what the verdict on the Commune of 
 the impartial judgment must be, in spite of the excesses 
 which—as M. Alfred Maury said to me at the Pere- 
 Lachaise, one day in 1879—were far surpassed by the 
 ferocity of a bloody and savage repression. 
 
 In the same way, on pages 20-22, he speaks (I can not 
 see why) of the “contempt” of Marxian socialists for 
 sentimental socialism, which no Marxian has ever dreamt 
 of despising, though we recognize it is little in harmony 
 with the systematic, experimental method of social sci¬ 
 ence. 
 
 And, on page 154, he seems to think, he is carrying 
 on a scientific discussion when he writes: “In truth, 
 when one sees men who profess such doctrines succeed 
 in obtaining a hearing, one is obliged to recognize that 
 there are no limits to human imbecility.” 
 
 Ah! my dear Baron Garofalo, how this language re¬ 
 minds me of that of some of the classical criminologists 
 —do you remember it ?—who tried to combat the positiv¬ 
 ist school with language too much like this of yours. 
 
182 
 
 which conceals behind hackneyed phrases, the utter lack 
 of ideas to oppose to the hated, but victorious heresy! 
 
 * * * 
 
 But aside from this language, so strange from the pen 
 of M. Garofalo, it is impossible not to perceive the strange 
 contrast between his critical talent and the numerous 
 statements in this book which are, to say the least, char¬ 
 acterized by a naivete one would never have suspected 
 in him. 
 
 ❖ ❖ * 
 
 It is true that, on page 74, like an individualist of the 
 good old days, and with an absolutism which we may 
 henceforth call pre-historic, he deplores the enactment 
 of even those civil laws which have limited the jus utendi 
 et abutendi (freely, the right of doing what one will with 
 one’s own—Tr.), and which have “seriously maimed the 
 institution of private property,” since, he says, “the 
 lower classes suffer cruelly, not from the existence of 
 great fortunes, but rather from the economic embar¬ 
 rassment of the upper classes” (page 77). What boldness 
 of critical thought and profundity in economic science! 
 
 And, in regard to my statement that contemporary 
 science is altogether dominated by the idea and the fact 
 of the social aggregate —and, therefore, of socialism— 
 in contrast to the glorification of the individual, and, 
 therefore, of individualism, which obtained in the Eight¬ 
 eenth Century, M. Garofalo replies to me that “the story 
 of Robinson Crusoe was borrowed from a very trust¬ 
 worthy history,” and adds that it would be possible to 
 
183 
 
 cite many cases of anchorites and hermits” who had no 
 need of the company of their fellows” (page 82). 
 
 He believes that he has thus demonstrated that I was 
 mistaken when I declared that the species is the sole 
 eternal reality of life and that the individual—himself 
 a biological aggregation—does not live alone and by him¬ 
 self alone, but only by virtue of the fact that he forms 
 a part of a collectivity, to which he owes all the creative 
 conditions of his material, moral and intellectual ex¬ 
 istence. 
 
 In truth, if M. Garofalo had employed such arguments 
 to expose the absurdities of metaphysical penology, and 
 to defend the heresies of the positive school, the latter 
 would certainly not number him among its most eloquent 
 and suggestive founders and champions. 
 
 * * * 
 
 And yet, M. Garofalo, instead of repeating these sop¬ 
 orific banalities, ought to have been able to discuss seri¬ 
 ously the fundamental thesis of socialism, which, through 
 the social ownership of the land and the means of pro¬ 
 duction, tends to assure to every individual the condi¬ 
 tions of an existence more worthily human, and of a full 
 and perfectly free development of his physical and moral 
 personality. For then only, when the daily bread of the 
 body and mind is guaranteed, will every man be able, as 
 Goethe said, “to become that which he is,” instead of 
 wasting and wearing himself out in the spasmodic and 
 exhausting struggle for daily bread, obtained too often 
 at the expense of personal dignity or the sacrifice of in¬ 
 tellectual aptitudes, while human energies are obviously 
 
184 
 
 squandered to the great disadvantage of the entire so¬ 
 ciety, and all this with the appearance of personal liberty, 
 but, in fact, with the vast majority of mankind reduced 
 to dependence upon the class in possession of economic 
 monopoly. 
 
 But M. Garofalo has altogether refrained from these 
 discussions, which admit of scientific arguments on either 
 hand. He has confined himself, on the contrary, even 
 when he has attempted to discuss seriously, to the repeti¬ 
 tion of the most superficial commonplaces. 
 
 Thus, for example (page 92), opposing the socialists 
 who maintain that the variations of the social environ¬ 
 ment will inevitably bring about a change in individual 
 aptitudes and activities, he writes : “But the world can 
 not change, if men do not first begin by transforming 
 themselves under the influence of those two ideal fac¬ 
 tors: honor and duty.” 
 
 That is the same as saying that a man must not jump 
 into the water .... unless he has learned beforehand to 
 swim, while remaining on the land. 
 
 Nothing, on the contrary, is more in harmony with 
 the scientific inductions of biology and sociology than 
 the socialist idea, according to which changes in the en¬ 
 vironment cause correlative changes, both physiological 
 and psychical, in individuals. The soul of Darwinism, 
 is it not wholly in the variability, organic and functional, 
 of individuals and species, under the modifying influence 
 of the environment, fixed and transmitted by natural 
 selection ? And neo-Darwinism itself, does it not consist 
 wholly in the constantly increasing importance attribut- 
 
185 
 
 /-t /r 
 
 ed to the changes in the environment as explanations of 
 the variations of living beings? 
 
 And, in the realm of sociology, just as, according to 
 the repeated and unquestioned demonstrations of Spen¬ 
 cer, in the passage of human societies from the military 
 type to the industrial type-—as Saint-Simon had already 
 pointed out—a change, a process of adaptation, also takes 
 place in that “human nature” which the anti-socialists 
 would have us believe is a fixed and immutable thing, 
 like the “created species” of old-school biology; in the 
 same way, in the gradual transition to a collectivist or¬ 
 ganization, human nature will necessarily adapt itself 
 to the modified social conditions. 
 
 Certainly, human nature will not change in its fuii-‘ " 
 damental tendencies; and, as an illustration, man like the 
 animals will always shun suffering and strive after pleas¬ 
 ure, since the former is a diminution and the latter an 
 augmentation of life; but this is not inconsistent with 
 the fact that the application and direction of these biolog¬ 
 ical tendencies can and must change with the changes in 
 the environment. So that I have been able elsewhere to 
 demonstrate that individual egoism will, indeed, always 
 exist, but it will act in a profoundly different fashion, 
 in a society whose conscious goal will be true human soli¬ 
 darity, from the way in which it acts in the individualist 
 and morally anarchical world of to-day, a world in which 
 every man, by the working of what is called “free compe¬ 
 tition,” is forced to follow the impulses of his anti-social 
 egoism, that is to say, to be in conflict, and not in har¬ 
 mony, with the wants and the tendencies of the other 
 members of society. \ 
 
186 
 
 But the repetition of worn-out commonplaces reaches 
 its climax when M. Garofalo—surely, through inatten¬ 
 tion—writes these marvelous lines: 
 
 “Apparently, many young men of aristocratic families 
 do not work. It is nevertheless more correct to say that 
 they do not do any productive labor for themselves, but 
 they work just the same (!!), and this for the benefit of 
 others! 
 
 “In fact, these gentlemen f of leisure’ are generally de¬ 
 voted to sport—hunting, yachting, horseback riding, 
 fencing—or to travel, or to dilettantisme in the arts, and 
 their activity, unproductive for themselves, provides an 
 immense number of persons with profitable occupa¬ 
 tions” (page 183). 
 
 One day, when I was studying the prisoners in a jail, 
 one of them said to me: Such an outcry is made against 
 the criminals because they do not work; but if we did 
 not exist, “an immense number of persons”—jailers, po¬ 
 licemen, judges and lawyers—would be without a “profit¬ 
 able occupation!” 
 
 * * * 
 
 After having noted these specimens of unscientific care¬ 
 lessness, and before entering upon the examination of 
 the few scientific arguments developed by M. Garofalo, 
 it will be well, to aid us in forming a general judgment 
 on his book, to show how far he has forgotten the most 
 elementary rules of the scientific method. 
 
 And it will be useful also to add a few examples of mis¬ 
 takes in regard to facts bearing either on science in gen¬ 
 eral, or on the doctrines combated by him. 
 

 
 — 187 — 
 
 On page 41, speaking of the scientific work of Marx 
 with a disdain which can not he taken seriously, since it 
 is too much like that of the theologians for Darwin or 
 that of the jurists for Lombroso, he reasons in this 
 curious fashion: 
 
 “Starting from the hypothesis that all private property 
 is unjust, it is not logic that is wanting in the doctrine 
 of Marx. But if one recognises, on the contrary, that 
 every individual has a right to possess some thing of his 
 own, the direct and inevitable consequence is [the right¬ 
 fulness of] the profits of capital, and, therefore, the 
 augmentation of the latter/’ 
 
 Certainly, if one admits a priori the right of individual 
 property in the land and the means of production . . . 
 it is needless and useless to discuss the question. 
 
 But the troublesome fact is that all the scientific work 
 of Marx and the socialists has been done precisely in 
 order to furnish absolute scientific proof of the true 
 genesis of capitalist property—the unpaid surplus-labor 
 of the laborer—and to put an end to the old fables about 
 “the first occupant,” and “accumulated savings” which 
 are only exceptions, ever becoming rarer. 
 
 Moreover, the negation of private property is not “the 
 hypothesis,” but the logical and inevitable consequence 
 of the premises of facts and of historical demonstrations 
 made, not only by Marx, but by a numerous group of 
 sociologists who, abandoning the reticence and mental 
 reservations of orthodox conventionalism, have, by that 
 step, become socialists. 
 
 * # * 
 
— 188 
 
 But contemporary socialism, for the very reason that 
 it is in perfect harmony with scientific and exact thought, 
 no longer harbors the illusions of those who fancy that 
 to-morrow—with a dictator of “wonderful intelligence 
 and remarkable eloquence,” charged with the duty of or¬ 
 ganizing collectivism by means of decrees and regula¬ 
 tions—we could reach the Co-operative Commonwealth 
 at a bound, eliminating the intermediate phases. More¬ 
 over, is not the absolute and unbridled individualism of 
 yesterday already transformed into a limited individual¬ 
 ism and into a partial collectivism by legal limitations of 
 the jus abutendi and by the continuous transformation 
 into social functions or public properties of the services 
 (lighting, water-supply, transportation, etc.) or proper¬ 
 ties (roads, bridges, canals, etc.), which were formerly 
 private services and properties? These intermediate 
 phases can not be suppressed by decrees, but they develop 
 and finish their course naturally day by day, under the 
 pressure of the economic and social conditions; but, by 
 a natural and therefore inexorable progress, they are 
 constantly approaching more closely that ultimate phase 
 of absolute collectivism in the means of production, 
 which the socialists have not invented, but the tendency 
 toward which they have shown, and whose ultimate at¬ 
 tainment they scientifically predict. The rate of progress 
 toward this goal they can accelerate by giving to the 
 proletarians, organized into a class-party, a clearer con¬ 
 sciousness of their historic mission, 
 
 & * * 
 
All through this hook are scattered not only defects 
 of method, but also actual errors in matters of fact. 
 The book is also marred by an immanent contradiction 
 that runs all through it, in connection with the absolutely 
 uncompromising attitude against socialism which the 
 author aims to maintain, but which he is unable to keep 
 up in the face of the irresistible tendency of the facts, 
 as we shall see in the conclusion of this analysis. 
 
 In chapter IY, M. Garofalo contends that civilization 
 would be menaced with destruction by the elevation to 
 power of the popular classes, M. Garofalo, who is of 
 an old aristocratic family, declares that “the Third 
 Estate, which should have substituted youthful energies 
 for the feebleness and corruption of an effete and degen¬ 
 erate aristocracy, has shown magnified a hundred-fold 
 the defects and corruption of the latter” (p. 206). This 
 is certainly not a correct historical judgment; for it is 
 certain that the Third Estate, which with the French 
 Revolution gained political ascendancy—a political as¬ 
 cendancy made inevitable by its previously won economic 
 ascendancy,—gave in the course of the Nineteenth Cen¬ 
 tury a new and powerful impulse to civilization. And 
 if to-day, after a century of undisputed domination, the 
 bourgeoisie shows “multiplied a hundred-fold” the de¬ 
 fects and the corruption of the aristocracy of the Eight¬ 
 eenth Century, this signifies simply that the Third Estate 
 has reached the final phase of its parabola, so that the 
 advent of a more developed social phase is becoming an 
 imminent historical necessity. 
 
190 
 
 Another error in criminal psychology—natural enough 
 for idealists and metaphysicians, but which may well 
 surprise us in an exact scientist—is the influence upon 
 human conduct which M. Garofalo attributes to the re¬ 
 ligious sentiment. “Moral instruction has no meaning, 
 or at least no efficacy, without a religious basis’ 5 (p. 267). 
 And from this erroneous psychological premise, he draws 
 the conclusion that it is necessary to return to religious 
 instruction in the schools, “selecting the masters from 
 / among men of mature age, fathers of families or ministers 
 of religion ” (p. 268). 
 
 v' , In combating this conclusion, truly surprising in a 
 
 scientist, it is useless to recall the teachings of the ex¬ 
 perience of former times in regard to the pretended 
 moralizing influence of the priest upon the school; and 
 
 
 
 cd*/ 
 
 
 
 \ 
 
 
 
 
 
 JW. ■ ^9* 
 
 
 of Jesus against the rich, the metaphor of the camel 
 passing through the eye of a needle, or the still more 
 violent invectives of the Fathers of the Church against 
 private property; for long before Proudhon, Saint 
 Jerome had said that “wealth is always the product of 
 theft; if it was not committed by the present holder, 
 it was by his ancestors,” and Saint Ambrose added that 
 “Nature has established community [of goods]; from 
 usurpation alone is private property born.” 
 
 If it is true that later on the Church, in proportion 
 as it departed from the doctrines of the Master, preached 
 
 
191 
 
 in favor of the rich, leaving to the poor the hope of 
 Paradise; and if it is true, as M. Garofalo says, that “the 
 Christian philosophers exhorted the poor to sanctify the 
 tribulations of poverty by resignation” (p. 166); it is 
 also true that, for example, Bossuet, in one of his famous 
 sermons, recognized that “the complaints of the poor are 
 justified;” and he asked: “Why are conditions so un¬ 
 equal ? We are all formed of the same dust, and nothing 
 can justify it.” So that recently, M. Giraud-Teulon, in 
 the name of an hermaphrodite liberalism, recalled that 
 “the right of private property is rather tolerated by the 
 Church as an existing fact than presented as a necessary 
 foundation of civil society. It is even condemned in its 
 inspiring principle by the Fathers of the Church.” 1 
 
 But apart from all this, it is sufficient for me to es¬ 
 tablish that the psychological premise, from which M. 
 Garofalo starts, is erroneous in itself. 
 
 Studying elsewhere the influence of the religious sen¬ 
 timent on criminality 2 ,1 have shown by positive docu¬ 
 mentary evidence, that religious beliefs, efficacious for 
 individuals already endowed with a normal social sense, 
 since they add to the sanction of the moral conscience 
 (which, however, would suffice by itself) the sanctions of 
 the life beyond the tomb—“religion is the guarantor 
 of justice” 3 —are, nevertheless, wholly ineffective, when 
 
 1 Giraud-Tenlon, Double peril social. L'Eglise et le social” 
 isme, Paris, 1894, p. 17. 
 
 2 E. Ferri, VOmicidio nelV antropologia criminate, Turin, 
 1895, together with Atlas and more especially Religion et 
 Criminality in la Revue des Revues, Oct., 1895. 
 
 3 De Molinari, Science et Religion , Paris, 1894. 
 
192 
 
 the social sense, on account of some physio-psychical 
 anomaly, is atrophied or non-existent. So that religious 
 belief, considered as a regulator of social conduct, is at 
 once superfluous for honorable people and altogether in¬ 
 effective for those who are not honorable, if indeed it is 
 not capable of increasing the propensity to evil by de¬ 
 veloping religious fanaticism or giving rise to the hope 
 of pardon in the confessional or of absolution in articulo 
 mortis, etc. 
 
 It is possible to understand—at least as an expedient 
 as utilitarian as it is highly hypocritical—the argument 
 of those who, atheists so far as they themselves are con¬ 
 cerned, still wish to preserve religious beliefs for the 
 people, because they exercise a depressing influence and 
 prevent all energetic agitation for human rights and 
 enjoyments here below. The conception of God as a 
 Policeman is only one among many illusions. 
 
 ^ 
 
 * Besides these errors of fact in the biological and psy¬ 
 chological sciences, M, Garofalo also misstates the social¬ 
 ist doctrines, following the example of the opponents of 
 the new school of criminology, who found it easier to 
 refute the doctrines they attributed to us than to shake 
 the doctrines we defended. 
 
 On page 14, M. Garofalo begins by stating, “the true 
 tendency of the party known as the Workingmen’s Party, 
 is to gain power, not in the interest of all, but in order to 
 expropriate the dominant class and to step into their shoe 
 They do not disguise this purpose in their programmed” 
 This statement is found again on page 210, etc. 
 
 
 
193 
 
 Now, it suffices to have read the programme of the 
 socialist party, from the Manifesto of Marx and Engels 
 down to the propagandist publications, to know, on the 
 contrary, that contemporary socialism wishes, and de¬ 
 clares its wish, to accomplish the general suppression 
 of all social divisions into classes by suppressing the di¬ 
 vision of the social patrimony of production, and, there¬ 
 fore, proclaims itself resolved to achieve the prosperity 
 of all, and not only—as some victims of myopia con¬ 
 tinue to believe—that of a Fourth Estate, which would 
 simply have to follow the example of the decaying Third 
 Estate. 
 
 Starting from this fundamental datum of socialism, 
 that every individual , unless he be a child, sick or an 
 invalid, must work, in order to live, at one sort or another 
 of useful labor, it follows as an inevitable consequence 
 that, in a society organized on this principle, all class 
 antagonism will become impossible; for this antagonism 
 exists only when society contains a great majority who 
 work, in order to live in discomfort, and a small minority 
 who live well, without working. 
 
 This initial error naturally dominates the entire book. 
 Thus, for instance, the third chapter is devoted to prov¬ 
 ing that “the social revolution planned for by the new 
 socialists, will be the destruction of all moral order in 
 society, because it is without an ideal to serve it as a 
 luminous standard” (p. 159). 
 
 Let us disregard, my dear Baron, the famous “moral 
 order” of that society which enriches and honors the 
 well-dressed wholesale thieves of the great and little 
 Panamas, the banks and railways, and condemns to im- 
 
194 
 
 prisonment children and women who steal dry wood or 
 grass in the fields which formerly belonged to the com¬ 
 mune. 
 
 But to say that socialism is without an ideal, when even 
 its opponents concede to it this immense superiority in 
 potential strength over the sordid skepticism of the pres¬ 
 ent world, viz., its ardent faith in a higher social justice 
 for all, a faith that makes strikingly clear its resem¬ 
 blance to the regenerating Christianity of primitive times 
 (very different from that “fatty degeneration’ 7 of Chris¬ 
 tianity, called Catholicism), to say this is truly, for a 
 scientist, to blindly rebel against the most obvious facts 
 of daily life. 
 
 M. Garofalo even goes so far as to say that “the want 
 of the necessaries of life” is a very exceptional fact, and 
 that therefore the condition of “the proletariat is a social 
 condition like that of all the other classes, and the lack of 
 capital, which is its characteristic, is a permanent eco¬ 
 nomic condition which is not at all abnormal for those 
 
 WHO ARE USED TO IT.” 1 
 
 Then—while passing over this comfortable and ego¬ 
 istic quietism which finds nothing abnormal in the mis¬ 
 ery ... of others—we perceive how deficient M. Garofalo 
 is, in the most elementary accuracy, in the ascertainment 
 of facts when we recall the suffering and ever-growing 
 multitude of the unemployed, which is sometimes a “local 
 and transitory” phenomenon, but which, in its acute 
 or chronic forms, is always the necessary and incon- 
 
 1 Garofalo suppressed these lines in the French edition of 
 his book. 
 
 
— 195 — 
 
 testable effect of capitalist accumulation and the intro¬ 
 duction and improvement of machinery, which are, in 
 their turn, the source of modern socialism, scientific so¬ 
 cialism, so different from the sentimental socialism of 
 former times. 
 
 # H* ❖ 
 
 But the fundamental fallacy, from which so many 
 thinkers—M. Garofalo among them—can not free them¬ 
 selves, and to which I myself yielded, before I had pen¬ 
 etrated, thanks to the Marxian theory of historic ma¬ 
 terialism—or, more exactly, of economic determinism 
 —into the true spirit of socialist sociology, is the tend¬ 
 ency to judge the inductions of socialism by the biolog¬ 
 ical, psychological and sociological data of the present 
 society, without thinking of the necessary changes that 
 will be effected by a different economic environment 
 with its inevitable concomitants or consequences, differ¬ 
 ent moral and political environments. 
 
 In M. Garofalo’s book we find once more this petitio 
 principii which refuses to believe in the future in the 
 name of the present, which is declared immutable. It is 
 exactly as if in the earliest geological epochs it had been 
 concluded from the flora and fauna then existing that it 
 was impossible for a fauna and flora ever to exist differ¬ 
 ing from them as widely as do the cryptogams from the 
 conifers, or the mammalia from the mollusca. 
 
 This confirms, once more, the observation that I made 
 before, that to deny the truth of scientific socialism 
 is implicitly to deny that law of universal and eternal evo- 
 
196 
 
 lution, which is the dominant factor in all modern scien¬ 
 tific thought. 
 
 On page 16, M. G-arofalo predicts that with the tri¬ 
 umph of socialism “we shall see re-appear upon earth the 
 reign of irrational and brutal physical force, and that 
 we shall witness, as happens every day in the lowest strata 
 of the population, the triumph of the most violent men ” 
 And he repeats this on pages 209-210; but he forgets 
 that, given the socialist premise of a better organized 
 social environment, this brutality, which is the product 
 of the present misery and lack of education, must neces¬ 
 sarily gradually diminish, and at last disappear. 
 
 Now, the possibility of this improvement of the social 
 environment, which socialism asserts, is a thesis that can 
 he discussed ; hut when a writer, in order to deny this 
 possibility, opposes to the future the effects of a present, 
 whose elimination is the precise question at issue, he 
 falls into that insidious fallacy which it is only neces¬ 
 sary to point out to remove all foundation from his argu¬ 
 ments. 
 
 $ * & 
 
 And it is as always by grace of this same fallacy that 
 he is able to declare, on page 213, that under the socialist 
 regime “the fine arts will be unable to exist. It is easy 
 to say, they will henceforth be exercised and cultivated 
 for the benefit of the public. Of what public? Of the 
 great mass of the people deprived of artistic education?” 
 As if, when poverty is once eliminated and labor has be¬ 
 come less exhausting for the popular classes, the com- 
 
197 
 
 fort and economic security, which would result from this, 
 would not be sure to develop in them also the taste for 
 aesthetic pleasure, which they feel and satisfy now, so 
 far as that is possible for them, in the various forms of 
 popular art, or as may be seen to-day at Paris and Vienna 
 by the “Theatre socialiste” and at Brussells by the free 
 musical matinees, instituted by the socialists and fre¬ 
 quented by a constantly growing number of working¬ 
 men. It is just the same with regard to scientific in¬ 
 struction, as witness “University Extension” in England 
 and Belgium. And all this, notwithstanding the present 
 total lack of artistic education, but thanks to the exist¬ 
 ence among the workers of these countries of an eco¬ 
 nomic condition less wretched than that of the agricul¬ 
 tural or even the industrial proletariat in countries such 
 as Italy. 
 
 And from another point of view, what are the museums 
 if not a form of collective ownership and use of the prod¬ 
 ucts of art ? 
 
 It is again, as always, the same fallacy which (at page 
 216) makes M. Garofalo write: “The history of Europe, 
 from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries, shows us, by 
 analogy, what would happen to the world if the lower 
 classes should come into power . . . How to explain the 
 medieval barbarism and anarchy save by the grossness 
 and ignorance of the conquerors? The same fate would 
 inevitably await the modern civilization, if the controlling 
 power should fall into the hands of the proletarians, 
 who, assuredly, are intellectually not superior to the ancient 
 barbarians and morally are far inferior to them !” 
 
 Let us disregard this unjustified and unjustifiable in- 
 
198 
 
 suit and this completely erroneous historical comparison. 
 It is enough to point out that it is here supposed that by 
 a stroke of a magic wand “the lower classes” will be 
 able in a single day to gain possession of power without 
 having been prepared for this by a preliminary moral 
 revolution, a revolution accomplished in them by the 
 acquired consciousness of their rights and of their or¬ 
 ganic solidarity. It will be impossible to compare the 
 proletarians in whom this moral revolution shall have 
 taken place with the barbarians of the Middle Ages. 
 
 * 
 
 ❖ * 
 
 
 In my book Socialismo et Criminalita, published in 
 1883, and which to-day my adversaries, including M. 
 Garofalo (p. 128 et seq.), try to oppose to the opinions 
 which I have upheld in my more recent book, Socialisme 
 et science positive (the present work), I have developed 
 two theses: 
 
 I. That the social organization could not be suddenly 
 changed, as was then maintained in Italy by the senti¬ 
 mental socialists, since the law of evolution dominates 
 with sovereign power the human world as well as the 
 inorganic and organic world; 
 
 II. That, by analogy, crime could not disappear ab¬ 
 solutely from among mankind, as the Italian socialists of 
 those days vaguely hinted. 
 
 Now, in the first place it would not have been at all 
 inconsistent if, after having partially accepted socialism, 
 which I had already done in 1883, the progressive evolu¬ 
 tion of my thought, after having studied the systematic, 
 scientific form given to socialism by Marx and his co- 
 
199 
 
 workers, had led me to recognize (apart from all personal 
 advantage) the complete truth of socialism. But, 
 especially, precisely because scientific socialism (since 
 [the work of] Marx, Engels, Malon, de Paepe, Dramard, 
 Lanessan, Guesde, Schaeffle, George, Bebel, Loria, Cola- 
 janni, Turati, de Greef, Lafargue, Jaures, Renard, Denis, 
 Plechanow, Vandervelde, Letourneau, L. Jacoby, La- 
 briola, Kautsky, etc.) is different from the sentimental 
 socialism which I had alone in mind in 1883, it is for 
 that very reason that I still maintain to-day these two 
 same principal theses, and 1 find myself in so doing in 
 perfect harmony with international scientific socialism. 
 
 And as to the absolute disappearance of all criminal¬ 
 ity, I still maintain my thesis of 1883, and in the present 
 book (§ 3), I have written that, even under the socialist 
 regime, there will be—though infinitely fewer—some 
 who will be conquered in the struggle for existence and 
 that, though the chronic and epidemic forms of nervous 
 disease, crime, insanity and suicide, are destined to dis¬ 
 appear, the acute and sporadic forms will not completely 
 disappear. 
 
 At this statement M. Garofalo manifests a surprise 
 which, as I can not suppose it simulated, I declare truly 
 inexplicable in a sociologist and a criminologist; for this 
 reminds me too strongly of the ignorant surprise shown 
 by a review of classical jurisprudence in regard to a new 
 scientific fact recorded by the Archives de psychiatric 
 of M. Lombroso, the case being the disappearance of 
 every criminal tendency in a woman after the surgical 
 removal of her ovaries. 
 
 But that the trepanning of the skull in a case of 
 
200 
 
 traumatic epilepsy or that ovariotomy can cure the 
 central nervous system and, therefore, restore the char¬ 
 acter and even the morality of the individual, these are 
 facts that can be unknown only to a metaphysical ideal¬ 
 ist, an opponent of the positivist school of criminology. 
 
 And yet this is how M. Garofalo comments on my in¬ 
 duction (p. 240); this commentary is reproduced again 
 on pages 95, 100, 134 and 291: 
 
 “It is truly extraordinary that M. Ferri, notwith¬ 
 standing that criminal anthropology, of which he has 
 so long been (and still is) one of the most ardent par¬ 
 tisans, should have allowed himself to he so blinded by 
 the mirage of socialism. A statement such as that which 
 I have quoted at first leaves the reader stunned, since 
 he sees absolutely no connection between nervous diseases 
 
 Kt 
 
 and collective ownership. It would be just as sensible 
 to say that by the study of algebra one can make sure 
 of one’s first-born child being a male.” How exactly 
 like the remarks of the Be view of jurisprudence com 
 cerning the case of the removal of the ovaries! 
 
 Now, let us see whether it is possible, by a supreme 
 effort of our feeble intellect, to point out a connection 
 between nervous diseases and collective ownership. 
 
 That poverty, i. e ., inadequate physical and mental 
 nutrition—in the life of the individual and through 
 hereditary transmission—is, if not the only and exclusive 
 cause, certainly the principal cause of human degenera¬ 
 tion, is henceforth an indisputable and undisputed fact. 
 
 That the poverty and misery of the working class—• 
 and notably of the unhappy triad of the unemployed, the 
 displaced [by machinery, trusts, etc.] and those who 
 
 
 
201 
 
 have been expropriated by taxation—is destined to dis¬ 
 appear with the socialization of the land and the means 
 of production:—this is the proposition that socialism 
 maintains and demonstrates. 
 
 It is, therefore, natural that under the socialist regime, 
 with the disappearance of poverty, there should be 
 eliminated the principal source of popular degeneracy 
 in the epidemic and chronic forms of diseases, crimes, 
 insanity and suicide; this can, moreover, be seen at 
 present—on a small scale, but clearly enough to positively 
 confirm the general induction—since diseases [nervous], 
 crimes, insanity and suicide increase during famines and 
 crises, while they diminish in years when the economic 
 conditions are less wretched. 
 
 There is still more to be said. Even among the aris¬ 
 tocracy and bourgeoisie, no one can fail to see that the 
 feverish competition and cannibalistic strife of our 
 present system beget nervous disorders, crime and sui¬ 
 cide, which would be rendered quite unnecessary by the 
 establishment of a socialist regime, which would banish 
 worry and uneasiness for the mo rrow from the human 
 race. 
 
 There then you see established the relation between 
 collective ownership and nervous diseases or degenera¬ 
 tion in general, not only among the popular and more 
 numerous classes, but also in the bourgeois and aris¬ 
 
 tocratic classes. 
 
 It is, indeed, astonishing that the anti-socialist prej¬ 
 udice of M. Garofalo should have been strong enough 
 to cause him to forget that truth which is nevertheless 
 a legitimate induction of criminal biology and sociology, 
 
202 
 
 * 
 
 the truth that besides the congenital criminal there are 
 other types of criminals who are more numerous and 
 more directly produced by the vitiated social environ¬ 
 ment. And, finally, if the congenital criminal is not 
 himself the direct product of the environment, he is in¬ 
 directly its product through the degeneration begun in 
 his ancestors, by some acute disease in some cases, but 
 by debilitating poverty in the majority of cases, and 
 afterward hereditarily transmitted and aggravated in 
 accordance with the inexorable laws discovered by mod¬ 
 ern science. 
 
 * 
 
 % 
 
 M. Garofalo’s book, which was announced as an assault 
 of science upon socialism, has been, even from this point 
 of view, a complete disappointment, as even the Italian 
 anti-socialists have confessed in several of the most or¬ 
 thodox Reviews. 
 
 It now remains for me to reply briefly to his observa¬ 
 tions—and they are few and far between—on the rela¬ 
 tions which exist between contemporary socialism and 
 the general trend and tendency of thought in the exact 
 sciences. 
 
 Disregarding the arguments which I had developed on 
 this subject by pointing out that there is an essential 
 connection between economic and social transmutation 
 (Marx) and the theories of biological transmutation 
 (Darwin) and of universal transmutation (Spencer), M. 
 Garofalo has thought it prudent to take up for considera¬ 
 tion only “the struggle for existence” and the relations 
 between “evolution and revolution.” 
 
203 
 
 As to the first, five pages (96—100) are enough to 
 enable him to declare, without supporting his declaration 
 by any positive argument which is not merely a different 
 verbal expression of the same idea, that the Darwinan 
 law of the struggle for existence has not undergone and 
 can not undergo any transformation except that which 
 will change the violent struggle into competition (the 
 struggle of skill and intelligence) 'and tliaFTKis^Iaw is 
 irreconcilable with socialism; for it necessarily requires 
 the sacrifice of the conquered, while socialism “would 
 guarantee to all men their material existence, so they 
 would have no cause for anxiety. 
 
 But my friend, the Baron Garofalo, quietly and com¬ 
 pletely ignores the fundamental argument that the so¬ 
 cialists oppose to the individualist interpretation that has 
 hitherto been given of the struggle for life and which 
 still affects the minds of some socialists so far as to 
 make them think that the law of the struggle for life 
 is not true and that Darwinism, is irreconcilable with 
 socialisms^ 
 
 
 The socialists, in fact, think that the laws of life are 
 the following, and that they are concurrent and insepar¬ 
 able: the struggle for existence and solidarity in the 
 struggle against natural forces. If the first law is in 
 spirit individualist, the second is essentially socialistic. 
 
 h T ow, not to repeat what I have written elsewhere, it 
 is sufficient here for me to establish this positive fact 
 that all human evolution is effected through the con¬ 
 stantly increasing predominance of the law of solidarity 
 over the law of the struggle for existence. 
 
 The forms of the struggle are transformed and grow 
 
204 
 
 milder, as I showed as long ago as 1883, and M. Garofalo 
 accepts this way of looking at the matter when he rec¬ 
 ognizes that the muscular struggle is ever tending to 
 become an intellectual struggle. But he has in view only 
 the formal evolution; he wholly disregards the progress¬ 
 ive decrease in the importance of the struggling func¬ 
 tion under the action of the other parallel law of solidar¬ 
 ity in the struggle. 
 
 Here comes in that constant principle in sociology, 
 that the social forms and forces co-exist always, but that 
 their relative importance changes from epoch to epoch 
 and from place to place. 
 
 Just as in the individual egoism and altruism co¬ 
 exist and will co-exist always—for egoism is the basis of 
 personal existence—but with a continuous and progress¬ 
 ive restriction and transformation of egoism, correspond¬ 
 ing to the expansion of altruism, in passing from the 
 fierce egoism of savage humanity to the less brutal ego¬ 
 ism of the present epoch, and finally to the more fra¬ 
 ternal egoism of the coming society; in the same way 
 in the social organism, for example, the military type 
 and the industrial type always co-exist, but with a 
 progressively increasing predominance of the latter over 
 the former. 
 
 The same truth applies to the different forms of the 
 family, and also to many other institutions, of which 
 Spencerian sociology had given only the descriptive 
 evolution and of which the Marxian theory of economic 
 determinism has given the genetic evolution, by explain¬ 
 ing that the religious and juridical customs and institu¬ 
 tions, the social types, the forms of the family, etc., are 
 
 
 
 
\ 
 
 2G5 — 
 
 only the reflex of the economic structure which differs 
 in varying localities (on islands or continents, according 
 to the abundance or scarcity of food) and also varies 
 from epoch to epoch. And—to complete the Marxian 
 theory—this economic structure is, in the case of each 
 social group, the resultant of its race energies develop¬ 
 ing themselves in such or such a physical environment, 
 as I have said elsewhere. 
 
 r 
 
 f 
 
 \ 
 
 The same rule holds in the case of the two co-existing 
 laws of the struggle for existence and of solidarity in the 
 struggle , the first of which predominates where the eco¬ 
 nomic conditions are more difficult; while the second 
 predominates with the growth of the economic 
 security of the majority. But while this security will 
 become complete under the regime of socialism, which 
 will assure to every man who works the material means 
 of life, this will not exclude the intellectual forms of 
 the struggle for existence which M. Tchisch recently 
 said should be interpreted not only in the sense of a 
 struggle for life , but also in the sense of a struggle for 
 the enrichment of life. 1 
 
 In fact, when once the material life of every one is 
 assured, together with the duty of labor for all the 
 members of society, man will continue always to struggle 
 for the enrichment of life , that is to say, for the fuller 
 development of his physical and moral individuality. 
 And it is only under the regime of socialism that, the 
 predominance of the law of solidarity being decisive, the 
 struggle for existence will change its form and sub- 
 
 1 Tcliiscli, la Lot fondamentale de la vie, Dorpat, 1895, p. i9. 
 
206 
 
 stance, while persisting as an eternal striving toward a 
 better life in the solidaire development of the individual 
 and the collectivity. 
 
 But M. Garofalo devotes more attention to the prac¬ 
 tical (?) relations between socialism and the law of evolu¬ 
 tion. And in substance , once more making use of the 
 objection already so often raised against Marxism and 
 its tactics, he formulates his indictment thus: 
 
 "The new socialists who, on the one hand, pretend to 
 speak in the name of sociological science and of the nat¬ 
 ural laws of evolution, declare themselves politically, on 
 the other hand, as revolutionists. Now, evidently science 
 has nothing to do with their political action. Although 
 they take pains to say that by “revolution” they do not 
 mean either a riot or a revolt—an explanation also con¬ 
 tained in the dictionary 1 —this fact always remains, viz.: 
 that they are unwilling to await the spontaneous organ¬ 
 ization of society under the new economic arrangement 
 foreseen by them in a more or less remote future. For 
 if they should thus quietly await its coming, who among 
 them would survive to prove to the incredulous the truth 
 of their predictions? 
 
 It is a question then of an evolution artificially 
 hastened, that is to say, in other words, of the use of 
 force to transform society in accordance with their 
 wishes” (p. 30.) 
 
 “The socialists of the Marxian school do not expect 
 
 1 And yet, how many judges have not, to the injury of the 
 Socialists, denied this elementary truth taught by the dic¬ 
 tionary! 
 
the transformation to he effected by a slow evolution, 
 but by a revolution of the people, and they even fix the 
 epoch of its occurence. 75 (p. 53.) 
 
 “Henceforth the socialists must make a decision and 
 take one horn of the dilemna or the other. 
 
 “Either they must be theoretical evolutionists, who 
 wait patiently until the time shall be ripe; 
 
 Or, on the contrary, they must be revolutionary demo¬ 
 crats; and if they take this horn, it is nonsense to talk 
 of evolution, accumulation, spontaneous concentration, 
 etc. ACCOMPLISH THEN THIS REVOLUTION, IF YOU 
 HAVE THE POWER . 77 (p. 151.) 
 
 I do not wish to dwell on this curious “instigation to 
 civil war 77 by such an orthodox conservative as the Baron 
 Garofalo, although he might be suspected of the not 
 specially Christian wish to see this “revolution of the 
 people’ 7 break out at once, while the people are still dis¬ 
 organized and weak and while it would be easier for the 
 dominant class to bleed them copiously.... 
 
 Let us try rather to deliver M. Garofalo from another 
 trouble; for on page 119 he exclaims pathetically: “I 
 declare on my honor I do not understand how a sincere 
 socialist can to-day be a revolutionist. I would be sin¬ 
 cerely grateful to anyone who would explain this to me, 
 for to me this is an enigma, so great is the contradiction 
 between the theory and the methods of the socialists. 77 
 
 Well then, console yourself, my excellent friend! Just 
 as in the case of the relationship between collective 
 ownership and human degeneration, which seemed so 
 “enigmatical 77 to this same Baron Garofalo—and al¬ 
 though he has not offered his gratitude for the solution 
 
208 
 
 of this enigma to the socialist Oedipus who explained 
 it to him—here also, in the case of this other enigma, 
 the explanation is very simple. 
 
 On the subject of the social question the attitudes as¬ 
 sumed in the domain of science, or on the field of politics, 
 are the following: 
 
 1st. That of the conservatives , such as M. Garofalo. 
 These, judging the world, not by the conditions object¬ 
 ively established, but by their own subjective impres¬ 
 sions, consider that they are well enough off under the 
 present regime, and contend that everything is for the 
 best in this best of all possible worlds, and oppose in 
 all cases, with a very logical egoism, every change which 
 is not merely a superficial change; 
 
 2nd. That of the reformers , who, like all the eclectics, 
 whose number is infinite, give, as the Italian proverb 
 says, one blow to the cask and another to the hoop and 
 do not deny—0, no!—the inconveniences and even the 
 absurdities of the present . . . but, not to compromise 
 themselves too far, hasten to say that they must confine 
 themselves to minor ameliorations, to superficial reforms, 
 that is to say, to treating the symptoms instead of the 
 disease, a therapeutic method as easy and as barren of 
 abiding results in dealing with the social organism as 
 with the individual organism; 
 
 3rd. That, finally, of the revolutionaries , who rightly 
 call themselves thus because they think and say that the 
 effective remedy is not to be found in superficial reforms, 
 but in a radical reorganization of society, beginning at the 
 very foundation, private property, and which will be so 
 profound that it will truly constitute a social revolution. 
 
209 
 
 It is in this sense that Galileo accomplished a scientific 
 revolution; for he did not confine himself to reforms 
 of the astronomical system received in his time, hut he 
 radically changed its fundamental lines. And it is in 
 this same sense that Jacquart effected an industrial 
 revolution, since he did not confine himself to reform¬ 
 ing the hand-loom, as it had existed for centuries, hut 
 radically changed its structure and productive power. 
 
 Therefore, when socialists speak of socialism as r evo¬ 
 lutionary ^ they mean by this to describe the programme 
 to be realized and the final goal to be attained and not 
 —as M. Garofalo, in spite of the dictionary, continues 
 to believe—the method or the tactics to be employed 
 in achieving this goal, the social revolution. 
 
 And right here appears the profound difference he- 
 j tween the method of sentimental socialism and that of 
 l scientific socialism—henceforth the only socialism in the 
 \ civilized world—which has received through the work 
 V of Marx, Engels and their successors that systematic 
 v iorm which is the distinctive mark of all the evolution¬ 
 ary sciences. And that is why and how I have been 
 able to demonstrate that contemporary socialism is in 
 full harmony with the scientific doctrine cff evolution. 
 
 Socialism is in fact evolutionary, but not in the sense 
 that M. Garofalo prefers of “waiting patiently until the 
 times shall be ripe” and until society “shall organize 
 spontaneously under the new economic arrangement,” 
 as if science necessarily must consist in Oriental con¬ 
 templation and academic Platonism—as it has done for 
 too long—instead of investigating the conditions of 
 
 i 
 
 'J 
 
7?w 
 
 
 
 6 *. 
 
 
 
 — 210 — 
 
 actual, every-day life, and applying its inductions to 
 them. 
 
 Certainly, “science for the sake of science/’ is a 
 formula very satisfactory to the avowed conservatives— 
 and that is only logical—and also to the eclectics; but 
 modern positivism prefers the formula of “science for 
 life’s sake” and, therefore, thinks that “the ripeness oi 
 the times” and “the new economic arrangement” will 
 certainly not he realized by spontaneous generation and 
 that therefore it is necessary to act, in harmony with 
 the inductions of science, in order to bring this realiza¬ 
 tion to pass. 
 
 To act, but how? 
 
 There is the ques tion of m ethods and tactics, which 
 differentiates utopian socialism from scientific socialism; 
 the former fancied it possible to alter the economic or¬ 
 ganization of society from top to bottom by the im¬ 
 provised miracle of a popular insurrection; the latter, on 
 the contrary, declares that the- law of evolution is su- 
 preme and that, therefore, the social revolution can be 
 nothing but the final phase of a preliminary evolution, 
 which will consist—through scientific study and propa¬ 
 ganda work—in the realization of the exhortation of 
 Marx: Proletarians of all countries, unite! 
 
 There then is the explanation of the easy enigma, 
 presented by the fact that socialism, though revolution¬ 
 ary in its programme, follows the laws of evolution in its 
 method of realization, and that is the secret of its vitality 
 and power, and that is also what makes it so essentially 
 different from that mystical and violent anarchism, which 
 class prejudices or the exigencies of venal journalism 
 
— 211 — 
 
 assert is nothing bnt a consequence of socialism, while 
 in fact it is the practical negation of socialism. 
 
 ❖ 
 
 ❖ ❖ 
 
 Finally, as a synthetic conclusion, I think it worth 
 while to show that, while in the beginning of his book 
 M. Garofalo starts out in open hostility to socialism with 
 the intention of maintaining an absolutely uncompro¬ 
 mising attitude, declaring on the first page that he has 
 written his book “for those who are called the bourgeois,” 
 in order to dissuade them from the concessions which 
 they themselves, in their own minds, can not prevent 
 themselves from making to the undeniable truth of the 
 socialist ideal, when he reaches the end of his polemic, 
 the irresistible implications of the facts force M. Garo¬ 
 falo to a series of eclectic compromises, which produce 
 on the reader, after so many accusations and threats of 
 repression, the depressing impression of a mental col¬ 
 lapse, as unforeseen as it is significant. 
 
 Indeed, M. Garofalo, on page 258, recognizes the use¬ 
 fulness of combinations of laborers to enable them “to 
 resist unjust demands,” and even declares it obligatory 
 upon factory-owners to assure a life-pension to their 
 laborers who have served them long.” (p. 275.) And he 
 demands for the laborers at all events “a share in the 
 profits” (p. 276); he recognizes also that the adult out 
 of work and in good health has the right to assistance, 
 no less than the sick man or the cripple (p. 281). 
 
 M. Garofalo, who by all these restrictions to his ab¬ 
 solute individualism has permitted himself to make con¬ 
 cessions to Socialism, which are in flagrant contradic- 
 
212 
 
 tion with his announced intention and to the whole 
 trend of his book, ends indeed by confessing that “if the 
 new socialists were to preach collectivism solely within 
 the sphere of agricultural industry , it would at least be 
 possible to discuss it, since one would not be confronted 
 at the outset by an absurdity, as is the case in attempt¬ 
 ing to discuss universal collectivism. This is not equiv¬ 
 alent to saying that agricultural collectivism 1 would be 
 easily put into practice/’ 
 
 That is to say that there is room for compromises and 
 that a mitigated collectivism would not be in contradic¬ 
 tion with all the laws of science, a contradiction*which 
 it seems his entire argument was intended to establish; 
 for M. Garofalo confines himself to remarking that the 
 realization of collectivism in land would not be easy 
 —a fact that no socialist has ever disputed.- 
 
 There is no need for me to point out once more how 
 this method of combating socialism, on the part of M. 
 Garofalo, resembles that which the classical crim¬ 
 inologists employed against the positivist school, when, 
 after so many sweeping denials of our teachings, they 
 came to admit that, nevertheless, some of our inductions, 
 for example, the anthropoliogical classification of crim¬ 
 inals, might well be applied ... on a reduced scale, in 
 the administration of jails and penitentiaries, but never 
 in the provisions of the criminal law! 
 
 During many years, as a defender of the positivist 
 school of criminology, I have had personal experience 
 of the inevitable phases that must be passed through by 
 
 1 More correctly, collective ownership of the land.—Tr. 
 
 ft 
 
213 — 
 
 a scientific truth before its final triumph—the conspiracy 
 of silence; the attempt to smother the new idea with 
 ridicule; then, in consequence of the resistance to these 
 artifices of reactionary conservatism, the new ideas are 
 misrepresented, through ignorance or to facilitate as¬ 
 saults upon them, and at last they are partially admitted 
 and that is the beginning of the final triumph. 
 
 So that, knowing these phases of the natural evolution 
 of every new idea, now when, for the second time, in¬ 
 stead of resting upon the laurels of my first scientific 
 victories, I have wished to fight for a second and more 
 radical heresy; this time the victory appears to me more 
 certain, since my opponents and my former companions 
 in arms again call into use against it the same artifices 
 of reactionary opposition, whose impotence I had already 
 established on a narrower battle-field, but one where 
 the conflict was neither less keen nor less difficult. 
 
 And so, a new recruit enlisted to fight for a grand and 
 noble human ideal, I behold even now the spectacle of 
 partial and inevitable concessions being wrung from 
 those who still pretend to maintain a position of uncom¬ 
 promising and unbending hostility, but who are help¬ 
 less before the great cry of suffering and hope which 
 Eprings from the depths of the masses of mankind in 
 passionate emotion and in intellectual striving. 
 
 
 JUuj 
 
 —. — i. » 
 
 ENRICO .FERRE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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