Socialism and positive science (Darwin-Spencer-Marx);

THE SOCIALIST LIBRARY. 1.

The Socialist Library.— L

EDITED BY J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P.

SOCIALISM AND POSITIVE
SCIENCE

(DARWIN— SPENCER— MARX)

BT

ENRICO FERRI

in

PROFESSOR OF PENAL LAW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ROME :
DIRECTOR OF THE Scuola Positiva :
DEPUTY.

TRANSLATED BY EDITH C. HARVEY

From the French Edition of 1896

FIFTH EDITION

LONDON

INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY,

23, BRIDE LANE, E.G.

1909.

EDITIONS

FIRST ............... April 1905

SECOND ............... Sept. 1905

THIRD ............... Nov. 1905

FOURTH... ............ Nov. 1906

FIFTH ............... Feb. 1909

NX

Al

7116S1

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PART I.

CHAP. PAGE

EDITOR'S PREFACE - v

PREFACE TO FRENCH EDITION - - ix

INTRODUCTION - - - xi

I. VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS

OF MUNICH ------ i

II. THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS - 8

III. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AND ITS VICTIMS 23

IV. THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST - 38
V. SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 47

VI. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES 55

VII. "THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE " AND THE " CLASS

STRUGGLE" ------ 62

PART II.
T VIII/ EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM 77

IX. THE ORTHODOX ARGUMENT AND THE SOCIA-
LIST ARGUMENT AS OPPOSED TO THE
THEORY OF EVOLUTION - 79

X. THE LAW OF APPARENT RETROGRESSION AND

COLLECTIVE PROPERTY - - 85

SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY 93

( Xlli EVOLUTION, REVOLUTION, REVOLT, SOCIALISM

AND ANARCHY in

PART III.

XIII. STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY 137

; XIV. MARX, DARWIN, SPENCER, &c. - - - 140

APPENDICES.

1. LETTER IN REPLY TO HERBERT SPENCER.

2. SOCIALIST SUPERSTITION AND INDIVIDUALIST

SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS.

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

Socialismo e Scienza Positiva was published in
Rome in 1894, and in the following year was
translated into French (from which this trans-
lation is made), German and Spanish. In
1901 it was published in English in America.

After having been an adverse critic of the
unscientific Utopian socialism which preceded
Marx, Ferri yielded in 1893 to Marx's influ-
ence, identified himself with the socialists in
the Italian Chamber of which he had been a
radical member since 1886, and began to
write Socialismo e Scienza Positiva.

In his recently published book on Democracy
and Reaction, Mr. Hobhouse points out h6w
the conservative and aristocratic interests in
Europe have armed themselves for defensive
and offensive purposes with the law of the
struggle for existence, and its corollary, the
survival of the fittest. Ferri's aim in this
volume has been to show that Darwinism is
not only not in intellectual opposition to
socialism, but is its scientific foundation.

In developing his argument, he brings his
new faith into organic touch with the studies
in criminology, especially social criminology,
upon which he had written a great work in
1880, a portion of which has been published
in the Criminology Series, edited by Dr.
Douglas Mojrison. No part of this present
study is more suggestive than the frequent
discussions which it contains upon the social

nature of crime, its connection with the char-
acteristics of the various stages in social evo-
lution, and the limits within which it can be
cured by better economic arrangements.

In common with most Marxian socialists,
Ferri attacks religion and capitalism, marriage
(as we know it) and private property in the
means of production, in the same breath. The
socialist movement in this country has not
only not considered these attacks to be essen-
tial to the success of socialism, but has largely
disagreed with them. It may be true logically,
as Ferri asserts, that once the evolutionary
process is granted, it is as easy to swallow the
gnat of eternal and self-existent force and
matter, as it is to swallow the camel of an
eternal and self-existent God. Neither belief
may explain the origin of force, of creative
power, of will to struggle. But the British
socialist, as a rule, has said " Those things
have nothing to do with socialism."

So also with marriage. Mr. Bryce suggested
to the Sociological Society a few days ago
(23rd March) that it was necessary to collect
and classify, with a view of drawing scientific
sociological inferences from them, the facts
regarding the working of laws making divorce
easy. These facts have not been collected
and until they are, dogmatising in a priori
fashion upon the sociological future of the
marriage tie has not seemed to the British
socialist a very profitable mental exercise.
He has been content to record two well
observed conclusions. The first is, that capi-
talism hinders the free play of simple affection
in marriage to-day, and is thus responsible
not only for many ghastly failures in matri-
monial ventures, but also for offspring phy-
sically and morally unfit. This Ferri describes
as " sexual selection the wrong way " (selection

sexuelle a rebours.) The second is, that
capitalist industrial methods are crushing the
family out of existence, and whatever family
theory may or may not be most in accordance
with socialist conceptions, as a matter of
actual fact, capitalism and family life cannot
flourish together.

Ferri has conclusively shown that the natural
basis of the family is menaced by the motives
and the conditions of the capitalist regime.
When that regime has been supplanted by
another such as the socialist contemplates, the
family will flourish on congenial soil and in
pure air, and its moral and sociological value
will decide what laws are to govern its form
and determine its stability. Taking these
things into consideration, one may, with
formidable array of argument, contend that
so far from the marriage bond being weakened
by socialism, the supreme moral and
sociological value of the family organisation
will be then so clear, that the secular state
will frown upon divorce as much as the
Catholic Church does at the present moment.
The chief value of this study, however, is
the claim that it so successfully makes, that
the socialist conception -of human progress
and of the social conditions which are to be
the characteristics of the next, the socialist,
stage in that evolution, is not only in
accordance with the processes which Darwin
proved to be the method of the development
of life from the moneron to man, but is
those very processes themselves applied to
human society with such modifications as are
necessitated by the fact that they now
relate to life which can consciously adapt
itself to its -circumstances and aid natural
evolution by economising in experimental
waste. Thus, socialism is naught but Dar-

winism economised, made definite, become an
intellectual policy, applied to the conditions
of human society.

The translation, which has been made by
Miss Harvey, is as literal as the medium of
English will allow.

J.R.M.
April, 1905.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

FOR THE FRENCH EDITION.

THIS VOLUME — which it is desired to bring
before the large public of French readers — in
entering on the complex and vast question of
socialism, has a well-defined and limited aim.

I have proposed to indicate, and nearly
always by means of rapid and summary
observations, the general relations between
contemporary socialism and the trend of
modern scientific thought.

The opponents of contemporary socialism
only see in it, or only wish to see in it, a
reproduction of the sentimental socialism of
the first half of the igth century. They
maintain that socialism is contrary to the
data and fundamental inductions of physics,
biology and sociology, the marvellous de-
velopment and fruitful applications of which
are the title to glory of the century just closed.

These opponents of socialism have made use
of the individual interpretations and exaggera-
tions of certain partisans of Darwinism, of
the opinions of such-and-such a sociologist —
opinions and interpretations in manifest con-
tradiction to the premises of their theories on
universal and inevitable evolution.

It has also been said, under the pressure of
acute or chronic hunger, that " if science is
against socialism, so much the worse for
science." And this is correct if by science —
even with a capital S — is meant all the
observations and conclusions ad usum delphini

which orthodox science, academic and official
— often in good faith, but sometimes also with
a view to personal interest — has always placed
at the disposal of dominant minorities.

I have believed it could be shown that
positive science is in complete agreement with
contemporary socialism which, since Marx
and Engels and their successors, differs essen-
tially from sentimental socialism both in its
scientific discipline and in its political tactics,
though it continues the generous efforts to
realise an identical aim : social justice for all
men.

I have loyally and sincerely maintained my
thesis on scientific grounds : I have always
recognised the partial truth of the theories of
our opponents, and I have not overlooked the
title to glory that the bourgeois class and
science have acquired since the French
Revolution. The disappearance of the
bourgeois class and science, which at their
coming had marked the disappearance of the
clerical and aristocratic class and science, will
have as a consequence the triumph of social
justice for the whole of humanity, without
distinction of classes, and the triumph of truth
in its final consequences without reservations.

The appendix contains my replies to a
letter of Herbert Spencer and to the anti-
socialistic book of M. Garofalo. It shows
what is the actual state of social science, the
struggle between ultra-conservative ortho-
doxy, which is prevented by its traditional
syllogisms from seeing the sad facts of contem-
porary life, and between the new heterodoxy
which is increasingly asserting itself among
the learned as also in the collective intelligence.

ENRICO FERRI.
Brussels, Nov., 1895.

INTRODUCTION.

A CONVINCED follower of Darwin and Spencer,
I • purpose demonstrating that Marxian
socialism — the only kind that has a positive
method and scientific worth, and that has
power henceforward to inspire and group the
social democrats of the whole civilised world
— is only the practical and fruitful comple-
ment in social life of that modern scientific
revolution, which, inaugurated several centur-
ies back by the revival of the experimental
method in all the branches of human know-
ledge, has triumphed in our days, thanks to
the labours of Charles Darwin and Herbert
Spencer.

It is true that Darwin, and especially
Spencer, stopped short half -way from the final
conclusions of religious, political and social
order, which necessarily follow from ;their
indisputable premises. But that is only an
individual episode which cannot stop the
inevitable march of science or delay the
fulfilment of its practical consequences which
accord admirably with the saddest necessities
of contemporary life. This is but one more
obligation to us to render justice to the
scientific and political life of Karl Marx, who
completes the renovation of modern scientific
thought.

Feeling and thought are the two inseparable
motive forces in the individual and the
collective life.

Socialism, w.hich was only a few years ago
at the mercy of the deep-rooted but undiscip-
lined fluctuations of humanitarian sentiment-

alism, found in the work of Marx and of those
who developed and completed it, its scientific
and social guide. In that lies the explanation
of each of its conquests.

Civilisation is the most fruitful and beauti-
ful development of human energies, but it also
contains an infectious virus of enormous
power. By the side of the splendour of
artistic, scientific and industrial work, it
accumulates cankered products, idleness,
misery, folly, rcrime, physical and moral
suicide — that is to say, slavery.

Pessimism — this mournful symptom of a life
without an ideal, and, in part, the effect of
the exhaustion, or even of the degeneracy of
the nervous system — extols final annihilation
in order to conquer pain.

We, on the contrary, have faith in the
eternal " healing power of Nature," and
socialism is exactly that breath of a new and
better life which will deliver humanity —
possibly after some access of fever — from the
noxious products of the present phase of
civilisation, and which in a future phase will
give a new expansion to the healthy and
fruitful energies of all human beings.

ENRICO FERRI.
Rome, June, 1894.

SOCIALISM AND POSITIVE
SCIENCE.

PART I.
CHAPTER I.

VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS
OF MUNICH.

ON the 1 8th September, 1877, Ernest
Haeckel, the celebrated embryologist
of Jena, gave an eloquent address at
the Congress of Naturalists, held at Munich, in
defence and explanation of Darwinism, at that
time the subject of most stormy controversies.

Some days after, Virchow, the great path-
ologist— a fighter in the parliamentary " pro-
gressive " party, who hates new theories in
politics as much as in science — violently
attacked the Darwinian theory of organic
evolution, and with a very just presentiment
launched against it the cry of alarm and the
political anathema; " Darwinism leads directly
to Socialism."

The German followers of Darwin, with

Oscar Schmidt and Haeckel at their head,
protested immediately ; and in order not to
add this grave political opposition to that
then raised against Darwinism from the
religious, philosophical, and biological schools,
they maintained that on the contrary the
Darwinian theory is in open and absolute
opposition to socialism.

" If the socialists were prudent (wrote Oscar
Schmidt in the Ausland, 2jih November, 1877)
they would do all in their power to hush up
in silence the theory of descent, for this doc-
trine proclaims aloud that socialistic ideas
are impracticable."

" In fact," said Haeckel, * " there is no
scientific doctrine that proclaims more openly
than the theory of descent, that the equality
of individuals, to which socialism tends, is an
impossibility, that this chimerical equality is
in absolute contradiction to the necessary
inequality of individuals existing as a matter
of fact everywhere.

" Socialism demands for all citizens equal
rights, equal duties, equal wealth, equal
enjoyments ; the theory of descent establishes,
on the contrary, that the realisation of these
wishes is purely and simply impossible, that,
in human as in animal societies, the rights,
the duties, the wealth, the enjoyments of all
the associated members neither will, nor cap,
ever be equal.

* Les preuves du transformisme. Reply to Virchow.
Paris, 1879. Translated Soury, pp. no, &c.

"The great law of differentiation teaches
that, as well in the general theory of evolution
as in its biological part — the theory of descent
—the variety of phenomena arises from an
original unity, the diversity of functions from
a primitive identity, the complexity of
organisation from a primordial simplicity.
The conditions of existence are from their
entry into life unequal for all individuals.
There must be added hereditary qualities and
innate tendencies which vary more or less.
How could one's work-in life and the results
that proceed from it be equal for all ?

"The more social life is developed, the
more the great principle of the division of
labour becomes of importance, the more the
stability of the whole state demands that its
members should divide among themselves the
varied duties of life, and as the work to be
accomplished by individuals, and the expen-
diture of strength, talent, abilities, which it
necessitates, differs in the highest degree, it is
natural that the reward of this work should
also differ. These are facts so simple and so
evident, that every intelligent and enlightened
politician ought, it seems to me, to extol the
theory of descent and general doctrine of
evolution as the best antidote to the absurd
levelling Utopias of socialism.

" And it is Darwinism, the theory of selec-
tion, that Virchow, in his denunciation, has
had more in view even than transform ism, the
theory of descent, which are always confused.
Darwinism is anything rather than socialistic.

"If one wishes to attribute a political
tendency to this English theory— which is
allowable — this tendency would only be
aristocratic, not at all democratic, still less
socialistic.

"The theory of selection teaches that in the
life of humanity, as in that of plants and
animals, everywhere and always a small
privileged minority alone succeeds in living
and developing itself ; the immense majority,
on the contrary, suffer and succumb more or
less prematurely. The germs of every kind of
plant and animal, and the young that are
produced from them, are innumerable. But
the number of those which have the good
fortune to develop to their complete maturity
and which attain the aim of their existence,
is comparatively insignificant.

" The cruel and pitiless ' struggle for exis-
tence ' which goes on everywhere in animate
nature, and most naturally go on, this eternal
and inexorable competition of all that lives,
is an undeniable fact. Only the small num-
ber chosen from the strongest and fittest can
sustain this competition victoriously : the
large majority of the unhappy competitors
must necessarily perish. This tragic fatality
may well be deplored, but it cannot be denied
nor changed. All are called, but few are
chosen.

" The selection, the ' election,' of these
' chosen ones,' is necessarily connected with
the defeat or the loss of a great number of
their living fellow creatures. Thus, another

learned Englishman has called the funda-
mental principle of Darwinism : ' the survival
of the fittest, the victory of the best.'

" In every case the principle of the selection
is anything rather than democratic : it is, on
the contrary, thoroughly aristocratic. If, then,
Darwinism, pushed to its final consequences,
has, according to Virchow, ' a very dangerous
side for the politician,' that is doubtless
because it favours aristocratic aspirations."

I have reproduced in their entirety, and
even in their form, all the arguments of
Haeckel because they are those repeated —
in varying tones and with expressions that
only differ from these in precision and
eloquence — by the opponents of socialism
who like to assume a scientific manner, and
who, to facilitate their dispute, make use of
these ready-made phrases which have more
currency, even in science, than one would
imagine.

It is easy, however, to show in this discus-
sion, that Virchow's point of view was more
exact and clear, and that the history of the
last twenty years has proved him to be right.

It has happened, in fact, that Darwinism
and socialism have both progressed with a
marvellous force of expansion. The first
gained from thenceforth the unanimous sup-
port of the scientists for its fundamental
theory ; the second continued to develop in
its general aspirations and political discipline,
flooding all Jhe channels of the social con-
science like a torrential inundation from

internal wounds due to the daily increase of
physical and moral disease, or like a slow,
capillary, irrevocable infiltration into minds
freed from all prejudices and unable to satisfy
themselves with the personal advantages
procured by the orthodox "raking in" of
profits.

But as theories, political or scientific, are
natural phenomena, and not the capricious
and ephemeral blossom of the free will of
those who make and propagate them, it is
evident that if these two currents of modern
thought have both been able to triumph over
the first and strongest opposition of scientific
and political conservatism, and if the phalanx
of their disciples is daily augmented, that of
itself is sufficient to prove — I would almost
say by a law of intellectual symbiosis — that
they are neither irreconcilable nor contra-
dictory.

Moreover, the three principal arguments to
which the anti -socialistic reasoning of Haeckel
is substantially reduced, cannot be maintained
against the most elementary criticism nor the
most superficial observation of daily life.

I. Socialism tends to an imaginary equality
of everybody and everything. Darwinism, on
the contrary, not only states, but explains the
organic reasons for the natural inequality
of the aptitudes and even of the needs of
individuals.

'II. In the life of humanity, as in that of
plants and animals, the immense majority of
those who are born are destined to perish

7

because only a small minority triumph in the
" struggle for existence." Socialism claims,
on the contrary, that all ought to triumph in
this struggle, and that no one ought to be
conquered.

III. The struggle for existence secures the
survival of the best, the victory of the
" fittest," and there consequently follows an
aristocratic gradation of selected individuals,
instead of the democratic, collectivist levelling
of socialism.

CHAPTER II.

THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS.

There is absolutely no foundation for the
first of the objections made to socialism in
the name of Darwinism.

If it were true that socialism aspires to the
equality of all individuals, it would be correct
to assert that Darwinism condemns it irre-
vocably.0

But though people even to-day fluently
/ repeat — some in good faith, like parrots that
recite ready-made phrases, others in bad faith
and through polemical dexterity — that social-
ism is synonymous with equality and level-
ling, the truth is, on the contrary, that
scientific socialism — that which is inspired by
the theory of Marx, and which alone deserves
at the present day to be defended or attacked
— has never denied the inequality of indi-
viduals as of all living beings — an inequality
innate and acquired, physical and moral.f

* J. de Johannis, II concetto dell' eguaglianza nel
socialismo e nella scienza, in Rassegna delle scienze
sociali. Florence, i5th March, 1883, and more recently
Huxley, On the Natural Inequality of Man in the
Nineteenth Century, January, 1890.

t Utopian Socialism has left as a mental habit, even
with the most convinced followers of Marxian socialism,
the affirmation of certain inequalities — the equality of the
two sexes for example — which cannot be sustained in any
manner. Rebel ( Woman in the Past, Present and Future,
trans. London, 1885), the propagandist and apostle of
Marxian theories, this clever and eloquent strategist of
democratic socialism, still repeats the affirmation that

It is as if one said that socialism claims
that a royal decree or a popular vote could
establish that " from henceforth all men shall
have a stature of five feet seven inches !"

But really socialism is something more
serious and more difficult to refute.

Socialism says : " Men are unequal, but they
are all men."

And, in fact, although every individual
is born and develops in a manner more or
less different from all other individuals — just
as there are not two leaves in a forest the
same, so in the whole world there are not two
men exactly equal — yet every man from the
fact alone that he is a human being has a. right
to the existence of a man and not of a slave
or beast of burden.

We also know that all men cannot accom-
plish the same work to-day, when social
inequalities are added to natural inequalities,

from a physio-psychical point of view woman is the equal
of man, and he attempts unsuccessfully to refute the
scientific objections that have been raised to this thesis.

After the scientific researches of MM. Lombroso and
Ferrero (Donna delinquente, prostituta e normals, Turin,
1893), the physiological and psychological inferiority of
woman compared with man cannot be denied. I have
given a Darwinian explanation of this fact (Scuola
positiva, 1893, nos. 7 and 8) which Lombroso has since
completely accepted (Uomo di genio, 6th edition, 1894)
in drawing attention to the fact that all the physio-
psychical characteristics of women are the result of her
great biological function — maternity.

A being that creates from herself another — not in the
fleeting moment of a voluptuous contract, but by the
organic and psychical sacrifice of pregnancy, childbirth
and suckling — cannot preserve for herself as much
strength as the man who has only an infinitely less
heavy function iff the reproduction of the species.

io

and that they could not do so any more under
a socialist regime when the social organisa-
tion will tend to diminish congenital inequal-
ities. There will always be people whose
brain or muscular system will be more fit for
scientific or artistic work, whilst others will
be more fit for manual work or for work of
mechanical precision, etc.

What ought not to be, and what will not
be, is that there should be men who do no
work, and others who work too much or who
are too poorly remunerated.

But we have attained the height of in-
justice and absurdity, and in these days it is
he who does not work who has the most
important advantages assured to him by the
individual monopoly of wealth, accumulated
by hereditary transmission. This wealth,
moreover, is very rarely due to the economy
and privations of the actual possessor or of
some industrious ancestor ; it is most fre-
quently the time-honoured fruit of spoliation

Also, save for certain individual exceptions, the
woman has less physical sensibility (the current opinion
is the contrary, but it confuses sensibility with irrita-
bility), because if her sensibility were greater she could
not, according to the Darwinian law, survive the
immense and repeated sacrifices of maternity, and the
species would die out. The woman has less intelligence,
especially in synthetic power, precisely because though
there are no women of genius (Sergi in Atti delta societd
romana di antropologia, 1894), or very nearly none, they,
however, give birth to men of genius.

This is so true that one meets with a greater sensrbility
and intelligence among women whose function and sense
of motherhood do not exist or are less developed (women
of genius have generally masculine features), and many
of them attain their complete intellectual development
just after the critical period when motherhood has passed.

tl

by military conquest, by unscrupulous specu-
lation, or by the favouritism of sovereigns ;
but it is in every case always independent of
any exertion, of any work useful to society, on
the part of the heir, who often dissipates his
fortune in idleness, or in the vortex of a life
as empty in reality as it is brilliant in
appearance.

And when we have not to consider a fortune
due to inheritance, we are faced with wealth
due to fraud. Without speaking for the
moment of the economic organisation, whose
mechanism Karl Marx has revealed to us,
which, even without fraud, normally allows
the capitalist or the landlord to live on his
revenues without working, it is incontestable
that the fortunes which have been made or
which have increased the most rapidly under
our eyes, cannot be the fruits of honest work.
The really honest workman, however inde-
fatigable and economical he may be, if he

But if it is scientifically certain that woman represents
an inferior degree of biological evolution, and that she is
placed even by her physio-psychical characteristics
between the child and the adult male, it does not
follow from this that the socialist conclusions in what
concerns the woman question are false.

Quite the contrary. Society ought to put woman, as a
human being and as a creator of men — more worthy
consequently of love and respect — in a better legal and
moral condition than she is in at present — too often a
beast of burden or object of luxury. Similarly when from
the economic point of view special measures are claimed
to-day in favour of women, consideration is only paid to
their special physio-psychical conditions, whilst the present
economic individualism wears them out in manufactories
and rice plantations. Socialism, on the contrary, de-
mands from them only professional, scientific or muscular
work which is in keeping with sacred motherhood.

12

succeeds in raising himself from a state of
wage- earning to that of foreman or employer,
can in a long life of privations accumulate at
the most a few hundred pounds. Those men,
however, who without industrial discoveries
due to their own talent accumulate millions
in a few years can only be unscrupulous
business men, if we except a few strokes of
good luck, and it is these parasites — bankers
and public speculators — who live most grandly,
who are decorated or placed in official posts
as the reward of their honest transactions.

The immense majority who work, only
receive a sustenance that barely suffices to
keep them from dying of hunger ; they live in
the back shops, the garrets, in the tumble-
down lanes of great towns, in the hovels in
the country that are not wanted as cow-sheds
or stables for horses.

To this we must add the horrors of unem-
ployment, the most painful and frequent of
the three symptoms of this equality in misery
which is spreading in the modern economic
world, in Italy and elsewhere, in a more or less
intense form.

I speak of the always increasing army of
those out of work in agriculture and in trade
and manufactures, of those thrown out of the
class of small householders, and of those who
are dispossessed of their little landed property
by taxes, debts, or usury.

It is therefore not accurate to state that
socialism asks for all citizens material and
positive equality of work and possessions.

13

The equality can only consist in an obliga-
tion on the part of each individual to work
for a livelihood if each is guaranteed condi-
tions of existence worthy of a human being
in return for service rendered to society.

Equality, according to socialism — as Benoit
Malon said* — ought to be understood in a
double sense : I. All men as such ought to be
assured of the conditions of human existence;
2. All men ought to be equal at the starting
point in the struggle for life, so that each may
freely develop his own personality with
equality of social conditions, whilst to-day a
healthy and robust, but poor child, in com-
petition with a feeble, but rich child, goes to
the wall.

This is the radical, incommensurable trans-
formation that socialism demands, but which
it also discovers and announces as an evolu-
tion— already begun in the world of to-day —
necessary and inevitable in the world of the
future.|

This transformation is. summed up in the
conversion of private or individual ownership
of the means of production, that is to say of
the physical basis of human life (land, mines,
houses, manufactories, machines, implements
of work, means of transport), into collective
or social ownership according to methods and
processes with which I will deal further on.

From this point we will hold it to have

* B. Malon, Le Socialisme integral, 2 vol., Paris, 1892.

t Letourneau Pass6, present et avenir du travail, in
Revue mensuelle de I'tcole d'anthropologie. Paris, icth
June, 1894.

H

been proved that the first objection of anti-
socialistic reasoning is not valid because its
premise is non-existent ; it supposes, in fact,
that contemporary socialism lays claim to a
chimerical, physical, and moral equality
among all men, when scientific and positive
socialism has never thought never even
dreamed of it.

Socialism maintains, on the contrary, that
this inequality — very much diminished in a
better social organisation which will do'away
with all the physical and moral imperfections
which misery accumulates from generation to
generation — will never, however, be able to
disappear, for the reasons Darwinism has
discovered in the mysterious mechanism of life,
in the infinite succession of men and species.

In every social organisation, in whatsoever
fashion one conceives it, there will always be
some men tall and others short, feeble and
strong, sanguine and nervous, more and less
intelligent, some superior in intelligence,
others in muscular force ; and it is well that
it should be so — anyhow, it is inevitable.

It is well, because the variety and inequality
of individual aptitudes produce naturally the
division of work which Darwinism has rightly
declared to be a law of individual physiology
and of social econony.

All men ought to work to live, but each
ought to give himself up to the work which
best corresponds to his ability. We should
thus avoid a hurtful waste of power, and work
would cease from being repugnant and become

15

agreeable and necessary as a condition of
physical and moral health.

And when all have given to society the
work which best corresponds to their innate
and acquired abilities, each has a right to the
same reward, because each has contributed
equally to the totality of labour which
sustains the life of the social aggregate, and
jointly with it, that of each individual.

The peasant who digs the ground performs
a work in appearance more modest, but quite
as necessary and meritorious as that of the
workman who makes a locomotive, of the
engineer who perfects it, or of the scholar
who struggles with the unknown in his study
or laboratory.

It is only necessary that in a society all
should work, just as in the individual
organism all the cells, for instance, the nerve
cells, the muscle cells, or bone cells, fulfil
their different functions, more or less modest
in appearance, but each equally necessary and
useful biologically to the. life of the whole
organism.

In the biological organism no living cell
remains inactive, and it is only nourished by
material exchanges in proportion to its work;
in the social organism no individual ought to
live without working, whatever may be the
form of his work.

Thus the greatest number of artificial diffi-
culties which opponents raise against socialism
are swept away.

But who will black the boots under the

i6

socialist regime? asks M. Richter in his
book so poor in ideas but which reaches the
grotesque when he supposes that in the name
of social equality the " great Chancellor " of
the socialist society will be forced, before
giving his attention to public affairs, to black
his boots and mend his clothes ! Really, if
the opponents of socialism had only argu-
ments of this kind, discussion would be
useless.

But all would wish to perform the least
fatiguing and most pleasant work, says
another with more apparent seriousness.

I would reply that this is equivalent to
demanding to-day a decree thus conceived:
" Henceforth all men shall be born painters
or surgeons."

But it is precisely these anthropological
varieties of temperament and character that
will secure, without its being necessary to
have recourse to a monkish regulation (another
baseless objection to socialism), this distribu-
tion of different intellectual and manual
labours.

Propose to a peasant of moderate intelli-
gence to devote himself to the study of
anatomy or the penal code, or inversely tell
the person whose brain is more developed
than his muscles to dig the ground instead of
observing with the microscope. They' will
each prefer the work for which they feel they
have the most ability.

When society is organised under a collec-
tivist regime the change of trade or profession

17

will not be as considerable as most imagine.
When industries for personal luxuries are once
suppressed — which are most often a defiance
to the misery of the masses — the quantity
and variety of labours will gradually, that is
to say, naturally, adapt themselves to the
socialistic phase of civilisation as they now
correspond to the bourgeois phase.

Besides, under the socialistic regime every-
one will have greater liberty to assert and
show his personal aptitude, and it will not
happen, as it does to-day, that from want of
pecuniary means many peasants or members
of the working class or small shop keepers
endowed with natural talents, remain
atrophied and are forced to be peasants,
workmen, or employees when they could
furnish society with a different and more
fruitful work better adapted to their peculiar
genius.

The essential point consists solely in this :
In exchange for the work with which they
supply society, the latter ought to assure to the
peasant and artisan, just' as to the man who
devotes himself to a liberal career, conditions
of existence worthy of a human being.

Then will also disappear the unworthy
spectacle which causes a dancer, for example,
to gain by her steps in one evening as much
as a scientist, a doctor, or a lawyer, in a year
of work — though they are indeed more likely
to impersonate misery in a black coat.

Certainly the arts will not be neglected in
the socialistic regime, because socialism

i8

desires life to be agreeable to all, and this
to-day is only the privilege of the few ; it
will give, on the contrary, a marvellous im-
petus to all the arts, and, if it abolishes
private luxury, it will be to favour the
splendour of public monuments.

More attention will be paid to the remuner-
ation given to each for work done, and
compensation for specially difficult or dan-
gerous tasks will be given by increasing the
value to the workman of each hour spent on
them. If a peasant in the open-air can work
seven or eight hours a day, a miner ought not
to work more than three or four hours. In
fact, when all the world works, and when
many unproductive works are suppressed, the
sum total of daily work to divide among men
will be much less heavy and easier to bear (in
consequence of more abundant food, more
comfortable lodging and recreations assured
to each) than it is to-day for those who work
and who are so badly treated. Also, the
progress of the application of science to in-
dustry will render the work of men less and
less laborious.

Individuals will voluntarily give themselves
up to work, although their salary or remunera-
tion cannot be accumulated as private riches,
because if a healthy, normal, well-nourished
man avoids excessive or badly-paid work, he
does not remain in idleness, for there is for
him a physiological and psychological neces-
sity to give himself up to a daily occupation
in keeping with his aptitudes.

19

The different kinds of sport are for the idle
classes a substitute for productive work which
a physiological necessity imposes on them to
save them from the disagreeable conse-
quences of absolute repose and from ennui.

The most serious problem will consist in
apportioning to each the payment for work.
It is known that collectivism adopts the
formula, " to each according to his work,"
whilst communism adopts the other, " to each
according to his need."

No one can give, in its practical details, the
solution of this problem ; but this impossi-
bility of foretelling the future in its smaller
details authorises no one to tax socialism with
being an unattainable Utopia. No one would
have been able to prophesy, a priori, from its
beginnings, the successive developments of
any civilisation : I shall prove that in speak-
ing of the methods of social renovation.

This we can confidently affirm, relying
upon the most certain inductions of psychology
and sociology.

One cannot deny, as' Marx himself has
declared, that the above second formula —
which according to some allows one to dis-
tinguish anarchy from socialism — represents
a more remote and more complex ideal. But
one cannot deny that the formula of collec-
tivism only represents one phase of social
evolution, a period of individual discipline
which must necessarily precede communism.*

* M. Zerboglie has very justly remarked that indivi-
dualism, acting without pressure of external sanction, and

20

We must not believe that socialism will
realise every possible ideal of humanity, and
that after it there will be nothing to desire
and conquer ! Our descendants would be
condemned to idleness and vagrancy if we
had the capacity to exhaust every possible
human ideal.

The individual or society which has no
longer any ideal to pursue is dead or about
to die. The formula of communism could
then be a further ideal when collectivism has
been completely realised by the historical
process with which I shall deal further on.

We are now able to conclude that there is
no contradiction between socialism and
Darwinism on the subject of equality among
all men. Socialism has never affirmed it, and
it aims, in agreement with Darwinism, to pro-
mote a better life for individuals and for
society.

This permits us also to answer the objection
too often repeated, that socialism stifles and
suppresses human personality under the leaden
mantle of collectivism by reducing individuals
to a monastic function, by making of them
so many human bees in the social hive.

It is exactly the contrary that is true.
Is it not evident that it is in the present

by a simple internal impulse of right — this is the distant
ideal of Herbert Spencer — would only be realised after a
phase of collectivism in which individual activity, and
instincts could discipline themselves into social solidarity
whilst escaping from the essentially anarchic individualism
of our time, in which every man, if he is sufficiently
clever to 'skirt the penal code,' may do what he pleases
without troubling himself about his fellow-men.

bourgeois organisation that thereare found this
atrophy and loss of so many individualities
which might develop to their own advantage
and to the advantage of society at large ?
To-day, in fact, apart from a few exceptions,
everyone is valued for what he possesses, and
not for what he is.

He who is born poor, obviously through no
fault of his own, may be endowed by nature
with artistic or scientific genius, but if he has
no patrimony of his own which will give him
the means of triumphing over his first
struggles, and of completing his personal
education, or if he has not, like the shepherd
Giotto, the good fortune to meet the rich
Cimabue — he must disappear without a name
in the great prison of wage slavery, and
society itself thus loses treasures of intellectual
force.

He who is born rich, although he owes his
fortune to no personal effort, even if he has
little brains, will play a leading part in the
theatre of life, and all servile persons will be
prodigal of praises and flattery, and he will
fancy, simply because he has money, that he
is a different sort of person from what he
really is.

When property has become collective, that
is under the socialist regime, each man will
have his means of existence assured, and daily
work will only serve to bring to light the
special aptitudes more or less original of each
individual, and the best and most fruitful
years of life 'will not be used up as they are

22

now by the painful and despairing conquest
of daily bread.

Socialism will assure to all a human life —
real liberty to show and develop the physical
and moral personalities born with them,
infinitely varied and unequal. Socialism does
not deny inequality, it only wishes to direct
it towards a free and rich development of
human life.

CHAPTER III.

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AND ITS VICTIMS.

Socialism and Darwinism are found to be
opposed, it is said, on a second point. Dar-
winism proves that the immense majority-
plants, animals, men — are destined to succumb
because only a small minority triumph " in
the struggle for life " ; socialism claims that
all ought to triumph, and that no one ought
to succumb.

One may first reply that even in the
biological domain of the " struggle for
existence," the disproportion between the
number of individuals who are born and that
of those who survive always lessens pro-
gressively as one rises from vegetables to
animals, and from animals to men.

This law of decreasing disproportion
between the " called " and the " chosen " is
shown even in the different species of the
same natural order.

In fact, with vegetables the individual
yields each year an infinite number of seeds,
and an infinitesimal number of these survive.
With animals the number of young from each
individual diminishes, and the number of
those that survive, on the contrary, increases.
Finally, with the human species, the number
of individuals to which each gives birth is
very small, and the greater number survive.

But againln the case of vegetables, animals,

and man, it is the inferior and most simple
species, the races and classes least varied in
the scale of beings, which reproduce themselves
most freely and whose generations succeed
one another most rapidly in consequence of
the lesser longevity of the individuals.

A fern produces millions of spores, and its
life is very short — whilst a palm tree gives a
few dozen seeds and lives a century.

A fish produces several thousand eggs—
whilst the elephant and the chimpanzee have
a few little ones that live a great number of
years.

In the human species savage races are the
most prolific, and have short life --whilst
civilised races have a low birth-rate and a
greater longevity.

From all this it follows that, even keeping
to the domain of pure biology, the number of
conquerors in the "struggle for existence" is
always more considerable relatively to the
number of births as one passes from vegetables
to animals, from animals to men, and from
inferior species or varieties to superior races
or varieties,

The iron law of "the struggle for existence"
rapidly reduces, then, the hecatomb of the
conquered as the forms of life become more
complex and perfect.

It would, therefore, be an error to invoke
against socialism the Darwinian law of
natural selection as it is manifested in primi-
tive forms of life without keeping account of
its continued attenuation as we pass from

25

vegetables to animals, from animals to men,
and among men themselves from the primitive
to the most advanced races.

And as socialism represents a more advanced
phase of progress in the life of humanity it is
still less allowable to urge against it as
an objection such a gross and inexact inter-
pretation of the Darwinian law.

It is certain that the opponents of socialism
have misused the Darwinian law, or rather
have misused the " brutal " interpretation of
it, to justify the modern individualistic com-
petition which is too often a disguised form
of cannibalism, and which has made the
proverb homo homini lupus (man a wolf to man)
a characteristic of our time, whereas Hobbes
only laid it down in the " state of nature "
era of humanity before the Social Contract.

But we cannot consider a principle to be
false because it has been misused ; that often
serves as a stimulus to specify more exactly
its nature and terms, so that we can make a
more exact practical application of it ; this
will be the result of my demonstration of the
perfect harmony that exists between Darwin-
ism and socialism.

Already in the first edition of my work
Socialismo e criminalita (pages 179, etc.), I
maintained that the struggle for existence is
a law inherent in humanity as in all living
beings, although its forms are continually
changing, and although it gets weaker.

This is still my opinion, and on this point
I do not agree with certain socialists who have

26

thought that they had completely conquered
the objection raised against them in the name
of Darwinism, by affirming that in human
society the " struggle for existence " is a law
which ought to lose its meaning and applic-
ability when the social transformation which
socialism aims at shall have been realised. *

It is a law which governs tyrannically all
living beings, microbes as well as anthropoid
apes, and should it cease to act and fall inert
at the feet of man as if he were not an indis-
soluble link in the great biological chain ?

I maintained, and I maintain still, that the
struggle for existence is a law inseparable from
life, and consequently from humanity itself ;
but that, whilst remaining an immanent and
continuous law, it is transformed by degrees
in its extent, and is attenuated in its forms.

In primitive humanity the struggle for
existence is scarcely to be distinguished from
that which obtains among other animals ; it
is the brutal struggle for daily food or for the
female — hunger and love are, in fact, the two

* Labusquiere in Rivista internazionale del socialismo,
Milan, 1880. No. 3. Lanessan, La lutte pour I' existence
el I'association pour la lutte, Paris, 1881. Loria, Discorso
su Carlo Darwin, Siena, 1882, p. 17, and following, and
Darwin e I'economia politica in Riv. di filosofia scientifica,
June, 1884. Colajanni, // socialismo, Catania, 1884, etc.

M. Colajanni recognised from this moment (note i, p.
58), that the basis of my thought was "more socialistic
than is that of many other persons who imagine themselves
to be socialists, and who are persecuted as such." 'My
book, in fact,Socialismo e criminalitd, only made criticisms
on the revolutionary method of the Italian socialism of
that time, still stamped with nebulous romanticism. The
import of my criticisms was exaggerated, not without

fundamental needs, and the two poles of
life — and its means are almost solely muscular
force. In a subsequent phase is added the
struggle for political supremacy (in the class,
in the tribe, in the village, in the town, in the
state), and, more and more, muscular force is
replaced by intellectual force.

In the historic period Grseco-Latin society
struggles for civil equality (abolition of
slavery) ; it triumphs, but does not stop
because life is a struggle ; the society of the
middle ages struggles for religious equality,
gains it, but does not stop ; and at the end
of the 1 8th century it struggles for political
equality. Should it now stop and rest
in its present state ? To-day society-
struggles for economic equality, not for
an absolutely material equality, but for
this more positive equality of which I have
spoken. And everything makes us foresee with
mathematical certainty that this victory will
be gained to give place to new struggles for
new ideals among our descendants.

reason, by conservatives more or less progressive ; but
already (1883) I was at the bottom a socialist, and I shall
prove it in the second edition of Socialismo e criminalitd..

My conviction became more complete and deeper, gradu-
ally and almost in spite of myself, by reading the popular
exposition of scientific socialism, which M. Turati wrote
in the Critica sociale, and M. Prampolini in the Giustizia;
I was at length definitely admitted to socialism through
the study of the works of Karl Marx, whose uncom-
promising dogmatism is clothed in a form a little dry and
hard, but whose general writings are irresistible, because
they are in complete harmony with the whole trend of
modern scientific thought.

The works of M. Loria, quite full of Marxian theories
which a marvellous stream of scientific learning fertilises,

28

The successive changes in the extent, or the
ideals of the struggle for existence, are
accompanied by a progressive mitigation of
the methods of the struggle ; violent and
muscular at first, they become more and more
peaceful and intellectual, despite certain
atavic reversions or certain psycho -patho-
logical manifestations of violence on the part
of individuals against society or of society
against individuals.

My opinion has recently found a striking
confirmation in the remarkable work of M.
Novikov, who, however, has not taken the
sexual struggle into account. I shall further
develop my demonstration in the chapter
devoted to the Moral Future of Humanity, in
the second edition of Socialismo e criminalita.^

For the moment it is sufficient for me, in
answer to the anti -socialistic objection, to
have shown that not only the disproportion
between the number of births and the number

and full of views of remarkable depth, completed my
socialistic education. Since then I have believed it my
duty to give to it my strict political adhesion ; besides,
even in the political world I was always impregnated
with socialistic ideas, and I remember that from the time
of my election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1886, my
controversies with the Republicans in the Epoca of Genoa
and the Lega della democrazia of Rome sprang from my
contention that the single fundamental question seemed
to me to be the social question.

I was still in this sociological phase which is, perhaps,
a necessary moment in scientific education, but which is
only an arrest of development if it does not attain the
practical and fruitful phase of socialism.

t Novikov, Les luttes entre socittes, leurs phases
successives. Paris, 1893. Lerda, La lotta per la vita in
Pensiero italiano, Milan, February and March, 1894.

29

of those who survive is always diminishing,
but also that the " struggle for existence "
itself changes its extent, and is weakened in
its processes with every successive phase of
biological and social evolution.

Socialism can then affirm that conditions
of human existence ought to be assured to all
men — in exchange for work performed for the
community — without thereby contradicting
the Darwinian law of the survival of the
victors in the struggle for existence, since this
Darwinian law ought to be comprised in, and
applied to (according to its different mani-
festation), the law of human progress.

Socialism, understood in the scientific
sense, does not deny and cannot deny that
there are always among men some " losers "
in the struggle for existence.

This question is more directly concerned
with the connection that exists between
socialism and crime, because those who claim
that the struggle for existence is a law which
does not apply to human society, affirm in
consequence that crime (an abnormal and
anti-social form of the struggle for life as work
in its normal and social form) ought to dis-
appear. They think likewise that they find a
certain contradiction between socialism and
the doctrines of criminal anthropology on the
born criminal, doctrines which are themselves
derived from Darwinism.0

* I regret to state here that M. Loria, usually so deep
and penetrating, has allowed himself to be swayed by
appearances. He has pointed out this so-called contra-
diction in his Economic Basis oj Society. He has been

30

I will wait to treat this question more
completely elsewhere. Here is a summary,
my opinion as a socialist and as an anthro-
pologist writer on criminology.

First of all, the positive criminal school is
occupied with life as it is — and its merit is
unquestionably to have applied to the study
of criminal phenomena the methods of experi-
mental science, to have shown the hypocritical
absurdity of the modern penal systems, which
are based on the conception of free-will and
of the moral fault, and which are realised in
the system of confinement in cells, one of the
aberrations of the igth century as I have
once called it: for that, the school wishes to sub-
stitute the simple segregation of individuals
who are not fit for social life in consequence
of pathological conditions, congenital or
acquired, permanent or transitory.

In the second place, to pretend that socialism
will make all forms of crime disappear is an
affirmation which proceeds from a generous
sentiment, but which is not founded on
rigorous scientific observation.

The school of scientific criminology demon-
strates that crime is a natural and social
phenomenon — like madness and suicide —
determined by the abnormal organic and
physical constitution of the delinquent, and

completely answered in the name of the school of positive
criminal anthropology by M. Rinieri de Rocchi, // diritto
penale e un'opera recente di Loria in the Scuola positiva
nella giurisprudenza penale of the i5th February, 1894,
and by M. Lombroso in Archivio di psichiatria e scienze
penali, 1894, xiv.

by the influences of the physical and social
environment. All anthropological factors,
physical and social, always co-operate together
to determine offences, the lightest as well as
the most serious — as they do in all other
human acts. What varies for every delinquent
and every offence is the decisive intensity of
each order of factors.*

For example, if it is a question of an assas-
sination, committed through jealousy or some
hallucination, the anthropological factor is
the most important, although some attention
cannot but be paid to the physical and social
environment. But if it is a question of a
crime against poverty, or even against persons,
committed by a crowd in revolt, or from
drunkenness, etc., it is the social environment
that becomes the preponderant factor, although
one cannot deny the influence of physical
environment and of the anthropological factor.

The same reasoning can be repeated — in
order to make a complete examination into
the objection raised to socialism in the name

* Enrico Ferri, Criminal Sociology (English trans-
lation), 1895. A recent work has just confirmed our
inductions in a positive manner : Forsanari di Verce,
Sulla criminalitd e le vicende economiche d' Italia dal
1873 <*l l89° (Turin), Library of Juridical Anthropology,
1894. The preface, written by M. Lombroso, ends with
these words : " We do not wish by this to misappreciate
the truth of the Socialist movement, which is destined
to change the current of modern history in Europe, and
which claims ad majorem gloriam of its conclusions that
all crime depends on economic influence : we share this
doctrine without wishing or being able to follow its mis-
takes : however enthusiastic we may be, we will never
renounce the tenth in its favour. We leave this useless
servility to the classic and orthodox authors."

32

of Darwinism — on the subject of common
illnesses. Besides, crime is a department in
human pathology.

All diseases, acute or chronic, infectious or
non-infectious, severe or slight, are the pro-
duct of the anthropological constitution of
the individual and of the influence of the
physical and social environment. The deter-
mining intensity of personal conditions or of
environment varies with different illnesses ;
phthisis or heart disease, for example, depends
principally on the individual organic consti-
tution, although attention must be paid to
the influence of the environment ; pellagra,*
cholera, typhus, etc,, depend, on the contrary,
chiefly on the physical and social conditions
of the environment. Phthisis also makes
ravages among persons in easy circumstances,
that is, among persons well fed and well
housed, whilst it is the poor, that is, the
persons badly fed, who furnish the greatest
number of victims to pellagra and cholera.

It is consequently evident that a socialist
regime of collective property, which will
assure to each the condition of human exis-
tence, will greatly diminish, or perhaps cause
to disappear — with the help of scientific dis-
coveries and the progress of hygienic measures
—the illnesses which are chiefly determined
by the conditions of the environment, that is
to say, by insufficient nourishment or by want

* A skin and nerve disease, known in Spain, Italy,
and,elsewhere, where maize of inferior quality is largely
consumed by the peasantry. — ED.

33

of protection against the inclemency of the
weather ; but we shall not see those illnesses
disappear which are due to wounds, to
insanity, to pulmonary affections.

We must say as much of crime. If misery
and the shocking inequalities of economic
conditions are suppressed, sharp and chronic
hunger will serve no longer as a stimulus to
crime ; better nourishment will bring about a
physical and moral amelioration ; the abuses
of power and riches will disappear, and we
shall see produced a considerable reduction of
crimes from want, chiefly caused by the social
environment. But what will not disappear
are outrages on chastity, through sexual path-
ological inversion, murders committed by
epileptics, robberies caused by psycho-patho-
logical degeneracy, etc.

For the same reason popular instruction
will be more spread, all the talented men will
be able to develop themselves and to freely
assert themselves ; but that will not cause
idiocy and imbecility, owing to hereditary and
pathological conditions, to disappear. Differ-
ent causes, however, will be able to exert a
preventive and palliative influence on congen-
ital degeneracy (common diseases, crime,
madness, nervous affections). There will be,
for instance, a better economic and social
organisation, advice of increasing efficacy
given by experimental biology, and procrea-
tion becoming less and less frequent in case of
hereditary disease by voluntary abstention.

In conclusion, we will say that even in the

34

social regime — although in infinitely less
proportions — there will always be some
vanquished in the struggle for existence, there
will be the victims of feebleness, of disease, of
insanity, of nervous disorder, of suicide. We
can then assert that socialism does not deny
the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence.
It will, however, have this unquestionable
advantage — that the epidemic and endemic
forms of human degeneracy will be completely
suppressed by the elimination of their principal
cause, the physical and, consequently, the
moral misery of the greatest number.

Then the struggle for existence, whilst still
remaining the eternal impulsive force of social
life, will assume forms continually less brutal
and more humane — intellectual forms ; its
ideal of physiological and psychical ameliora-
tion will be constantly raised, owing to the
vitalising effect of daily bread for body and
mind being assured to each person.

The law of the " struggle for life " must not
make us forget another law of natural and
social Darwinism. Certainly many socialists
have given it an excessive and exclusive
importance just as certain individualists have
left it completely in oblivion. I mean the
law of solidarity which unites all living beings
of the same species — for example, the animals
that live in a community in consequence of
the abundance of a common food (herbivora),
or even the animals of different species living
in a state which naturalists call symbiosic
union for life.

35

It is not true to affirm that the struggle for
life is the only supreme law in nature and
society, just as it is false to claim that this law
does not apply to human society. The real
truth is that even in human society the
struggle for life is an eternal law which
weakens progressively in its forms and rises in
its ideals ; but beside it we find a law whose
action is progressively more efficacious in
social evolution, the law of solidarity or of
co-operation among living beings.

Even in societies of animals mutual help
against natural forces or against living species
is constantly manifested, and in all the more
intense fashion when we come to the human
species, even to savage tribes. It is found
especially among tribes which, in consequence
of favourable conditions of environment or
in consequence of assured and abundant
food, enter into the industrial and pacific
stage. The military or warlike type which
^unhappily rules (in consequence of insecurity
and insufficiency of food) among primitive
mankind, and in the reactionary phases of
civilisation, offers us less frequent examples.
The industrial type tends constantly, more-
over, as Spencer has shown, *to take the place
of the warlike type.*

* See in this sense the celebrated writings of Kropot-
kin, Mutual Aid among the Savages, in the Nineteenth
Century, gih April, 1891, and Among the Barbarians,
ibid., January, 1892 [published in Mutual Aid : a factor of
evolution, 1902. — ED.], and also two recent articles
signed "A Professor," appearing in the Revue socialiste
of Paris, Ma"y and June, 1894, under the title Lutte ou
accord pour la vie.

36

Referring to human society alone, we may
put it this way : whilst in the first stages of
social evolution the law of the struggle for
existence takes precedence of the law of
solidarity, the more the division of labour
and in consequence the connection between
the individuals of the social organism grows,
the more does the law of co-operation or
solidarity acquire a force progressively more
intense and extended, and that for the funda-
mental reason which Marx has indicated and
which constitutes his grand scientific dis-
covery, because the conditions of existence,
and primarily food, are or are not assured.

In the life of individuals, as in that of
societies, when food, that is to say the physical
basis of existence, is assured, the law of
solidarity takes precedence of the law of the
struggle for existence, and the inverse of this
also holds good. Among savages, infanticide
and parricide are acts not only permitted, but
obligatory, and sanctified by religion, if the
tribe lives on an island where food is scanty
(for example in Polynesia), and they con-
stitute immoral and criminal acts on conti-
nents where food is more abundant and more
sure.*

In the same way in our present society, the
majority of individuals not being sure of
their daily bread, the struggle for life, ,or
" free competition," as individualists call it,
takes more cruel and more brutal forms.

As soon as, with collective property, each

* Enrico Ferri, Omicidio nell' antropologia crimincile.
Introduction, Turin, 1894.

37

individual has his conditions of existence
assured, the law of solidarity will be pre-
ponderant.

When in a family things go well and
daily bread is assured, harmony and reciprocal
goodwill reign ; as soon as poverty makes its
appearance, discord and struggle follow.
Society, as a whole, presents us with this
picture magnified. A better social organisa-
tion will secure everywhere harmony and
reciprocal kindness.

Such will be the triumph of socialism, and
such is, once more, the most complete and
fruitful interpretation that socialism gives of
the inexorable natural laws discovered by
Darwinism.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.

The third and last division of Haeckel's argu-
ment is correct if it is restricted to the purely
biological and Darwinian domain, but his
starting point is false if it is applied to the
social domain and is used as an objection to
socialism.

It is said: the struggle for existence secures
the survival of the best or the best fitted ; it
consequently determines an aristocratic pro-
cess of individualist selection and not the
democratic levelling of socialism.

Here again, let us begin by finding out
exactly once more, of what consists this famous
natural selection, the consequence of the
struggle for existence.

The expression of which Haeckel makes use,
and which is besides commonly employed,
"survival of the best or the best adapted,"
ought to be corrected. We ought to suppress
the adjective best. It is the residue of a
teleology which saw in nature and history a
finality to be attained by means of a continuous
amelioration.

Darwinism, on the contrary, and still more
the theory of universal evolution, has excluded
all finality from modern scientific thought a'nd
from the interpretation of natural phenomena;
evolution consists both of involution and dis-
solution. It can happen, and it does happen,
that in comparing the two ends of the road

39

travelled over by humanity we state that there
has really been progress, amelioration on the
whole, not following a straight ascending
line, however, but as Goethe has said, a
spiral with rhythms of advance and retro-
gression, of evolution and dissolution.

Every cycle of evolution in the individual
as in the collective life carries in itself the
germs of the corresponding cycle of dissolution,
and the latter inversely by the decay of the
already worn out form prepares in the eternal
laboratorynewevolutionsandnew forms of life.
It is thus that in the social human world
every phase of civilisation carries within itself
and always develops further the germs of its
own dissolution whence is derived a new phase
of civilisation — whose geographical seat will
be more or less changed — in the eternal
rhythm of living humanity. The ancient
ecclesiastical civilisations of the East dissolve
and give birth to the Graeco- Roman world to
which succeeds the feudal and aristocratic
civilisation of Central Europe ; this also being
dissolved through its own excesses, like the
preceding civilisations, is replaced by the
bourgeois civilisation which has attained its
culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon world.
But this already feels the first shiverings of
the fever of dissolution, whilst a socialist
civilisation is being born and is developing
itself, a civilisation which will flourish over
a vaster domain than that of the other
civilisations which have preceded it.*

* One of the most characteristic phases of social dis-
solution is that of parasitism, cf Massart and Vander-
velde, Parasitism, Organic and Social, London, 1895.

40

It is not, therefore, correct to claim that
natural selection determined by the struggle
for existence secures the survival of the best ;
really it secures the survival of the best adapted.

It is very different whether it is a question
of natural or of social Darwinism.

The struggle for existence necessarily deter-
mines the survival of the individuals best
adapted to the society and the time in which
they live.

In the natural, biological domain the free
play of forces and of cosmic conditions secures
a progressive elevation of living forms from
the microbe up to man.

In human society, on the contrary, that is to
say in the superorganic evolution of Mr. H.
Spencer, the interference of other forces and
of other conditions determines occasionally a
selection which is retrograde but which always
secures the survival of those best adapted to a
given society and point of time, in keeping
with the corrupted conditions — if they are
such — of this same society and point of time.

The problem is one in "social selections."
It is in starting from this idea wrongly in-
terpreted that certain writers, socialists and
non-socialists, arrive at refusing to Darwinian
theories an applicability to human society.

One knows in fact that in the contemporary,
civilised world natural selection is vitiated by
military selection, by matrimonial selection,
and principally by economic selection.*

* Broca, Les selections (§ Social selections) in
Mdmoires d' anthropologie, Paris, 1877, in. 205 Lapouge,
Les Selections sociales, in Revue d' anthrop. 1887, p.
519. Loria, Discorso su Carlo Darwin, Siena, 1882.

The temporary celibacy imposed on soldiers
exercises a certainly deplorable influence on
the human race ; it is the young men with
the least good constitutions, who, relieved of
military service, marry the earliest, whilst the
most healthy individuals are constrained to
temporary sterility, and in the large towns
run the chances of syphilis, the effects of
which are unfortunately permanent.

Marriage itself, corrupted as it is in our
present civilisation by economic interests,
exercises usually a sexual selection in the
wrong way. Women degenerate in healiht
but, possessing a large fortune, find a husband
more easily than the more robust women of
the people or the middle class without a
marriage portion, and these are condemned to
remain sterile in an enforced celibacy, or to
give themselves up to a prostitution more or
less gilded, j

It is incontestable that economic conditio'ns
have an influence on all social relations. The
monopoly of wealth assures to its possessors
victory in the struggle for existence ; rich
persons, even when they' are less robust, have
a longer life than those who are ill fed ; the
labour by day and by night under cruel
conditions imposed on adult men, and the
still more disastrous work imposed on women

Vadala, Darwinistno naturale e darwinisme sociale,
Turin, 1883. Bordier, La vie des societes, Paris, 1887.
Sergi, Le degenerazioni umane, Milan, 1889, p. 158.
Bebel, Woman in the Past, Present, and Future, London
1885.

t Max Nordau, Conventional Lies of our Civilisation,
London, 1895. '

and children by modern capitalism, make the
biological conditions of the proletarian class
daily worse. *

To that we must add that moral selection
in the wrong way which causes capitalism to-
day in the struggle waged with the proletariat
to favour the survival of men of servile
character, whilst it persecutes and tries to keep
in the shade men of strong character and all
those who do not seem disposed to bear the
yoke of the present economic order, f

The lirst impression which we get from the
statement of all these facts is, that the
Darwinian law of natural selection is worth-
less, and is not found to apply to human society.

I have maintained, and 1 maintain, on the
contrary, first, that these social selections of
backward tendency are not in contradiction
to the Darwinian law, and more, that they
serve as material for an argument in favour of
socialism. Socialism in fact will alone be able
to bring about a more beneficent working of
this inexorable law of natural selection.

In fact the Darwinian law does not deter-
mine the survival of the best, but only of the
best adapted.

* On this question can be consulted, outside demo-
graphic statistic, the abstracts worked out at Turin in 1879
by M. Pagliani, the present director general of the office
of Hygiene to the Ministry of the Interior, on the different
development of the human body, notably more backward
and more feeble among the poor than among the rich.
This fact shows itself less at the time of birth than in
infancy and later, that is to say as soon as the influence
of economic conditions makes its inexorable tyranny felt.

t Turati, Selezione servile in Critica Sociale, i, June,
1894. Sergi, Degenerazioni umane, Milan, 1889.

43

It is evident that the degeneracy produced
by social conditions, and notably by the
present economic organisation, will still only
contribute, and always increasingly, to the
survival of those best adapted to this econo-
mic organisation itself.

If the conquerors in the struggle for exist-
ence are the worst and the most feeble, that
does not mean that the Darwinian law does
not apply ; it simply means that the society
is vitiated and that those who survive are
precisely those who are best adapted for this
vitiated society.

In my studies in criminal psychology I have
too often been obliged to state that in prisons
and in the criminal world it is the fiercest or
the most cunning criminals who enjoy a
triumph ; it is the same in our modern
economic individualism ; the victory belongs
to him who has fewest scruples, the struggle for
existence favours him who is the best adapted
to a world where a man is valued for what he
has (in whatever way he may have obtained
it) and not for what he is.

The Darwinian law of natural selection
works then even in human society. The error
of those who deny this proposition arises
because they confuse the present society and
time — which bears in history the name of
bourgeois, as the middle ages were called
feudal — with the whole history of humanity ;
and in consequence they db not see that the
disastrous effects of retrogressive modern
social selection are only a confirmation of the
survival of the best adapted. Popular obser-

44

vation has summed up this fact in a proverb :
" The cask gives the wine it contains "; and
scientific observation finds its explanation in
the necessary biological relations which exist
between a given society and the individuals
which are born, struggle and survive in it.

On the other side this statement constitutes
a peremptory argument in favour of socialism.
In freeing society of all the corruptions
with which an unbridled economic individual-
ism pollutes it, socialism will necessarily
correct the effects of natural and social
selection. In a society physically and morally
healthy the best adapted, those who will
consequently survive, will be healthy.

In the struggle for existence, victory will
then belong to him who possesses the greatest
and most fruitful physical and moral energies.
The collectivist economic organisation, in
assuring to each the conditions of existence,
must necessarily ameliorate the human race
physically and morally.

To that one may answer : let us admit that
socialism and Darwinian selection can be
reconciled, is it not evident that the survival
of the best adapted will form an aristocratic
individualist process which is contrary to the
socialist levelling ?

I have already partly answered this objec-
tion in observing that socialism will assure to
all individuals — and not only to some
privileged ones or to some heroes, as now—
the freedom to assert and to develop their own
personality. Then indeed the effect of the
ggle for existence will be the survival of

45

the best, and that precisely because in a
normal society it is to normal individuals that
victory belongs. Social Darwinism, therefore,
in continuing natural Darwinism will bring
about a selection towards the best. To
answer completely this affirmation of an
unlimited aristocratic selection, I must recall
another natural law which completes this
rhythm of action and reaction whence results
the equilibrium of life.

To the Darwinian law of natural inequalities
must be joined another law which is insepar-
able from it and which Jacoby following the
works of Morel, Lucas, Galton, De Candole,
Ribot, Spencer, Mme. Royer, Lombroso, etc.,
has brought into full daylight.

This same nature which makes of "choice"
and of aristocratic elevation a condition of
vital progress, then re-establishes equilibrium
by a levelling and democratic law.

" Out of the immensity of humanity indi-
viduals, families, and races spring up which
tend to raise themselves above the common
level. Painfully they climb abrupt heights,
reach the summit of power, of wealth, of
intelligence, of talent, and, once having
attained,. are precipitated below and disappear
in the abysses of madness and degeneracy.
Death is the great leveller ; whilst annihilating
all that rise, it democratises humanity.*

* Jacoby, Etudes sur la selection dans ses rapports
avec I' herddit& chez I' homme, Paris, 1881, p. 606.

Lombroso, The Man of Genius, London, 1889, has
developed and completed this law.

It is this law which all those forget too easily who,

46

Everythings that tends to constitute a
monopoly of natural forces comes into collision
with this 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.

Everything which is too much above or too
much below the human average, an average
which is raised with time, but which is of
absolute value for each historic period — dies
out and disappears.

The cretin, the man of genius, the pauper
and the millionaire, the dwarf and the giant,
are so many natural and social monstrosities,
and nature strikes them inexorably with
degeneracy or sterility, whether they be the
product of organic life or the effect of the
social organisation.

It is also an inevitable destiny for all
families that possess any sort of monopoly —
monopoly of power, wealth, or talent — to see
their last offspring become mad or sterile or
commit suicide, and finally be extinguished.
Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, families
of artists or learned men, descendants of mil-
lionaires, all follow the common law which,
once again, confirms the inductions, in this
sense levelling, of science and socialism.

like Nietzsche in our days, attempt to modernise aristo-
cratic individualism by views, sometimes deep and
original, but often also fantastic and foolish.

It is this same law which Mr. Ritchie ignores (Dar-
winism and Politics, London, 1891) in his Section 4 —
"Does the doctrine of Heredity support aristocracy?"
and M. Boucher in his treatise Darwinism et Social-
isme, Paris, 1890.

CHAPTER V.

SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS.

None of the three contradictions between
socialism and Darwinism which Haeckel
formulated, and which so many authors have
repeated after him, withstands a frank and
more exact examination of the natural laws
attached to the name of Charles Darwin.

I add that not only is Darwinism not
contrary to socialism, but that it forms one
of its fundamental scientific premises. As
Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing
else than the logical and vital outcome partly
of Darwinism and partly of Spencerian
evolution.

Darwin's theory, whether one likes it or
not, in showing that man descends from
animals, has struck a great blow at the belief
in God as the creator of the universe and of
man by a special fiat. It is for that reason,
moreover, that the most implacable opposition,
and the only one which subsists against his
scientific induction was, and is, maintained
in the name of religion.

It is true that Darwin did not declare him-
self an Atheist, and Mr. Spencer was not one ;
it is also true that, strictly speaking, Darwin's
theory and Spencer's can be reconciled with a
belief in God, because one can admit that
God has created matter and force, and that

48

both have then evolved their successive forms
following an initial creative impulse.

One cannot, however, deny that these
theories, whilst rendering more and more
inflexible and universal the idea of causality,
lead necessarily to the negation of God,
because one can always ask oneself : " and
who has created God? " And if the answer
is : " God has always existed," one can retort
by affirming that the universe has always
existed. Following the remark of M. Ardigo,
human thought cannot conceive that the chain
which binds effects to causes, can terminate
at a purely conventional given point.*

God, as Laplace has said, is an hypothesis
of which positive science has no need. He is,
according to Herzen, at the most an X which
contains in itself not the unknowable — as
Spencer and Dubois Reymond claim — but all
that humanity does not yet know. Also it is
a variable X which decreases in proportion
as the discoveries of science advance.

It is for this reason that science and religion
are in inverse ratio one to the other ; the
one diminishes and becomes feeble in the
same measure as the other increases and is
strengthened in its struggle with the unknown.

And if this is a consequence of Darwinism,
its influence on the development of socialism
is perfectly evident.

The disappearance of the faith in something
beyond when the poor will become the elect

* Ardigo, La Formazione naturale, vol. n, in his
Opere filologiche, and vol. 6, La Ragione, Padua, 1894.

49

of the Lord, and when the miseries of this
" valley of tears " will find^an eternal com-
pensation in Paradise, gives more vigour to
the desire of a little "terrestrial Paradise"
down here for the unhappy and the less
fortunate who are the most numerous.

Hartmann and Guyau* have shown that
the evolution of religious beliefs can be thus
summarised : all religions have within them-
selves the promise of happiness, but primitive
religions admit that the happiness wilP be
realised during the life itself of the individual,
and later religions, by an excess of reaction,
transport it outside this'mortal world 'after
death; in the last phase this realisation of
happiness is again replaced' in human life, no
longer in the short moment of individual
existence, but in the continued evolution
of the whole of humanity.

On this side again, socialism is joined to
religious evolution and tends fto substitute
itself for religion because it desires precisely
that humanity should have in itself its own
" terrestrial paradise " . without having to
wait for it in a "something beyond," which,
to say the least, is very problematical.

Also it has been very justly remarked that
the socialist movement has numerous charac-
teristics common, for instance, to primitive

* What is predominant, however, in religious beliefs is
the hereditary or traditional sentimental factor ; that is
what makes them always respectable, if they are pro-
fessed in good faith, and often even sympathetic — and
that precisely on account of the candid and delicate
sensibility of the persons among whom religious faith is
the most vital and sincere.

50

Christianity, notably its ardent faith in
the ideal which has finally deserted the arid
field of bourgeoise scepticism, and certain
learned men, not socialists, such as Messrs.
Wallace,* Laveleye, and Roberty, etc., admit
that socialism, by its humanitarian faith, can
perfectly replace the faith in the " something
beyond " of the old religions.

The most direct and efficacious relations
are, however, those 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 beliefs are a private
affair, and that consequently, the socialist
party will fight religious intolerance in all its
forms, whether it be directed against Catholics
or Jews, as I have indicated in an article
against Antisemitism.j" But this superiority
of view is, at the bottom, only a consequence
of confidence in a final victory.

It is because socialism knows and foresees
that religious beliefs, whether we consider
them with M. SergiJ as pathological pheno-
mena of human psychology or as useless
phenomena of moral incrustation, must waste
away before the extension of even elementary
scientific culture ; it is for that reason that
socialism does not feel the necessity of fighting
specially these same religious beliefs which

* Dr. Wallace has now become a Socialist.— ED.
t Nuova Rassegna, August, 1894.
I Sergi, L'origine del fenomeni psichici e loro signifi-
cazione biologica, Milan, 1885, p. 334 and the following.

are destined to disappear. It has taken this
attitude even though it knows that the absence,
or lessening, of the belief in God is one of the
most powerful factors in its extension, because
the priests of all religions have been, in all
phases of history, the most powerful allies of
the governing classes in keeping the masses
bent under the yoke, thanks to religious
fascination, as the tamer keeps wild beasts
under his whip.

And that is so true that the most clear-
sighted conservatives, even if they are atheists,
regret that the religious sentiment — this very
precious narcotic — should continue to dimin-
ish among the masses, because they see in it,
if their pharisaism does not allow them to
say it openly, an instrument of political
domination.*

Unhappily, or happily, the religious senti-
ment cannot be re-established by a royal
decree. If it disappear one cannot blame
either Titus or Caius, and there is no need of
a special propaganda against it, for that is in
the air we breathe — saturated as it is with
scientific, experimental inductions — and the
sentiment no longer finds conditions favour-
able to its development, as it found in the
mystic ignorance of past centuries.

I have thus shown the direct influence of
modern positive science, which has substituted

* As for the pretended influence of religion on personal
morality, I have shown what little foundation there is for
this opinion in my studies of criminal psychology, and
more especially in Omicidio nell' antropologia criminate.

52

the conception of natural causality for the
conception of miracle and divinity, on the
very rapid development and on the experi-
mental foundation of contemporary socialism.

Democratic socialism does not view
" Catholic socialism " with an evil eye, because
it has nothing to fear from it.

Catholic socialism, in fact, contributes to
the propaganda of socialist ideas, notably in
the rural districts, where faith and religious
observance have still much life in them, and
it is not Catholic socialism that will gather
the palm of victory ad majorem Dei gloriam.
As I have shown, there is an increasing
antagonism between science and religion, and
the socialist varnish will not be able to pre-
serve Catholicism. " Terrestrial " socialism,
besides, possesses a much greater power of
attraction.

When peasants are familiarised with the
views of Catholic socialism, it will be very
easy for democratic socialism to collect them
under its own flag. They will, moreover,
themselves effect their own conversion.

Socialism finds itself in an analogous
position towards republicanism. Just as
atheism is a private matter that concerns the
individual conscience, so the republic is a
private affair that interests portions of the
bourgeoisie. Certainly when socialism is
ready to triumph, atheism will have made
immense progress, and the republic will have
been established in many lands which to-day
submit to a monarchical regime. But it is

53

not socialism which develops atheism any
more than it is socialism which will establish
the republic. Atheism is a product of the
theories of Darwin and Spencer in the present
bourgeois civilisation, and the republic has
been, and will be, in different countries the
work of a part of the capitalist bourgeoisie,
as was recently written in some conservative
newspapers of Milan, when it was said, " the
monarchy will no longer serve the interests
of the country " — that is to say, of the class
in power.

The evolution from absolute monarchy to
constitutional monarchy and to republicanism,
is an evident historical law; in the civilisation
of to-day the only difference is in the elective
or the hereditary character of the head of
the State. In the different European countries
the bourgeoisie itself will demand this passage
from the monarchy to the republic in order to
delay as long as possible the triumph of social-
ism. In Italy, as in France, in England as in
Spain, one sees only too many republicans
or radicals whose attitude towards social
questions is more bourgeois and conservative
than that of intelligent conservatives. At
Montecitorio, for example, M. R. Imbriani,
has in religious and social matters more
conservative opinions than M. di Rudini, M.
Imbriani, whose personality is moreover very
sympathetic, has never attacked a priest or a
monk — he who attacks the whole universe,
and very ofteji rightly, though without much
success, in consequence of an error in his

54

method — and he alone has opposed even with
blows the laws proposed by M. L. Ferrari,
deputy, who increased the succession tax on
inheritances in the indirect line.**

Socialism has thus no more interest in
preaching republicanism than it has in
preaching atheism. To each his role, that is
the law of division of labour. The struggle
against atheism is the business of science ;
the establishment of the republic has been,
and will be, the action in the different
countries of Europe of the bourgeoisie itself,
conservative or radical. All that is history
marching towards socialism, whilst individuals
are unable to hinder or retard the succession
of the phases of the moral, political and
social evolution.

* English readers will readily supply from their own
experience substitutes for the names of the Italian poli-
ticians referred to here. — ED.

CHAPTER VI.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES.

We can again show that scientific socialism
proceeds directly from Darwinism by
examining the different modes of conceiving
the individual in relation to the species.

The eighteenth century finished with the
exclusive glorification of the individual^ of
the man — as an entity in himself. In the
works of Rosseau this was only a beneficent
excess of reaction from the political and
sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages.

This individualism has created, as a direct
consequence, a political artificialism with
which I shall occupy myself later in studying
the relations of the theory of evolution and of
socialism, and which is common to the govern-
ors in the bourgeois regime and to individual-
ist anarchists — because they both imagine that
the social organisation can be changed in a
day by the magical effect of a clause of a
law or by a bomb more or less murderous.

Modern biology has radically changed this
conception of the individual, and it has shown
in the domain of biology as in that of sociol-
ogy that the individual is himself only an
aggregate of more simple living elements, and
at the same time that the individual in him-
self, the Selbstwesen of the Germans, does not
exist in himself but only as far as he is a
member of a society (Gliedwesen).

56

Everything living forms an association, a
collective whole. The moneron itself, the
living cell, the irreducible expression of the
biological individuality, is also an aggregate
of different parts (nucleus, nucleolus, proto-
plasm), and each of these in its turn is an
aggregate of molecules, which are aggregates
of atoms.

The atom does not exist alone as an indi-
vidual ; the atom is invisible and impalpable,
and does not live. And the complexity of
the aggregate, the federation of parts, increases
continually as we pass in the zoological
series from the protozoa to man.

The unifying and equalising Jacobin artifi-
cialism corresponds to the metaphysics of
individualism just as the conception of
national and international federalism corre-
sponds to the positive character of scientific
socialism.

The organism of a mammal is only a
federation of tissues, organs, structure ; the
organism of a society can only consist of a
federation of townships, provinces, regions :
the organism of humanity can only consist of
a federation of nations.

If it is absurd to conceive of a mammal
whose head, for instance, should move in the
same manner as its extremities, and its
extremities should all move together, there is
no less absurdity in a political and adminis-
trative organism in which the province in the
extreme North, or the mountainous province,
for instance, should have the same official

57

machinery, the same body of laws, the same
movements as the province in the extreme
South, or the province composed of plains
from the simple love of symmetrical
uniformity, this pathological expression of
unity.

If we leave on one side these considerations
of political order in accordance with which
we conclude, as I have done elsewhere;* that
the only organisation possible for Italy, as
for every other country, seems to me to be
that of an administrative federalism in a
political unity, we can consider as proved,
that at the end of the igth century the indi-
vidual, as a being in himself is dethroned in'
biology as in sociology.

The individual exists but only in so far as
he makes part of the social aggregate.

Robinson Crusoe, this perfect type of indi-
vidualism, can only exist as a legend or a
pathological case.

The species — that is to say the social
aggregate — is the great, the living and eternal
reality of life, as Darwinism has shown, and
as all the positive sciences from astronomy to
sociology have shown.

At the end of the i8th century Rousseau
thought that the individual alone exists, and
that society is an artificial product of the
"social contract," and as he attributed (just
as Aristotle had done for slavery) a permanent
human character to the transitory manifesta-
tions of the historical period of the decay of

* Criminal Sociology, London, 1895.

58

the regime in which he was living, he added
that society is the cause of all evils, and that
individuals are born good and equal. At the
end of the igih century, on the contrary, all
the positive sciences are agreed in recognising
that aggregation is a natural and inseparable
fact of life, with vegetable as with animal
species from the lowest " animal colonies " of
zoophytes to the societies of mammals
(herbivora) and to human society.*

All that the individual possesses of what is
best, he owes to the social life, although every
phase of the evolution be marked at its close
by pathological conditions of social decay,
essentially transitory moreover, which inevi-
tably precede a new cycle of social renovation.

The individual, as such, if such could be,
would satisfy only one of the two fundamental
needs of existence — nourishment — that is to
say, the egoistic preservation of his own
organism, by means of this periodical and
fundamental function which Aristotle desig-
nates by the name of ctesi — the conquest of food.

* I cannot concern myself here with the recent eclectic
attempt of M. Fouill£e which others have followed. M.
Fouill6e wishes to oppose, or at least to add, to the
naturalist conception of society that of consent or con-
tract. Evidently, since no theory is absolutely false, there
is even in the theory of contract a particle of truth, and
the freedom to emigrate may be an example of it — as long
as it is compatible with the economic interests of the
class in power. But evidently this consenting which does
not exist at the birth of each individual in such or such
a society — and this being born forms the most decisive
and tyrannical deed in life — is likewise very trifling in the
development of his aptitudes and tendencies, dominated
as these are by the iron law of the economic and political
organisation of which he is an atom.

59

But all individuals must live in society,
because a second fundamental need of life is
imposed on them, that of the reproduction of
beings similar to themselves for the preserva-
tion of the species. It is this life of relation
and of reproduction (sexual and social) which
gives birth to the moral or social sense, and
which allows the individual not only to be,
but to co-exist with his fellows.

We can say that these two fundamental
instincts of life — bread and love — accomplish
a function of social equilibrium in the life of
animals, and notably of men.

It is love which causes, for the greatest
number of men, the principal physiological
and psychical expenditure of forces accumu-
lated in a more or less large amount by the
daily food which the daily toil has not
absorbed or which parasitic laziness has left
intact.

Much more is love the only pleasure which
has really universal and levelling character.
The people have called it " the Paradise of the
poor " and religions have always invited them
to enjoy it without limits — crescite et multipli-
camini (be fruitful and multiply) because the
erotic exhaustion which results from it,
especially among males, diminishes or makes
them forget the tortures of hunger and servile
toil, and enervates in a lasting manner the
energy of the individual ; and in this way it
fulfils a useful function for the dominant class.

But with this effect of the sexual instinct
another is inclissolubly linked — the increase of

66

the population so that the desire to maintain
a given social order clashes against the pressure
of the people (described in our time as the
proletariat), and social evolution pursues its
inexorable and irresistible course.

The conclusion of our discussion is that
whilst at the end of the i8th century it was
thought that society was made for the indi-
vidual— and it could then be inferred that
millions of individuals might and ought to
work and suffer for the exclusive advantage of
a few other individuals ; at the end of the
igth century the positive sciences have proved
quite the contrary — that it is the individual
who lives for the species, and that the latter
alone is the eternal reality of life.

That is the point of departure of the
sociological or social tendency of modern
scientific thought as opposed to the exagger-
ated individualism left as an heritage by the
1 8th century.

Biology shows also that we must not fall
into the opposite extreme — as certain schools
of Utopian socialism and of communism have
done — and only see society and completely
neglect the individual. Another biological
law shows us, in fact, that the existence of the
aggregate is the resultant of the life of all the
individuals, just as the existence of an indi-
vidual is the resultant of the life of the cells
of which it is composed.

We have shown that the socialism which
characterises the end of the igth, and which
illumines the dawn of this century, is in perfect

6i

harmony with the whole current of modern
thought. This harmony is even manifested in
the fundamental question of the predominence
given to the vital exigencies of collective or
social solidarity over the dogmatic exaggera-
tions of individualism. If this latter marks,
at the end of the i8th century, a powerful
and fruitful awakening in consequence of
pathological manifestations of unbounded
competition it inevitably leads to the liber-
tarian explosions of anarchism which preaches
individual action and which completely forgets
human and social solidarity.

We thus arrive at the last point of contact
and at the intimate union which exists bet ween
Darwinism and socialism.

CHAPTER VII.

; FOR LIFE " AND THE " CLASS
STRUGGLE."

Darwinism has proved that all the mechan-
ism of animal evolution is reduced to the
struggle for existence between individuals
of one species, on the one hand, and between
different species in the whole world of living
beings, on the other.

In the same way all the mechanism of social
evolution has been reduced by Marxian social-
ism to the law of the struggle of the classes.
This theory does not give us only the secret
motive power and the sole positive explanation
of the history of humanity, it give us also the
ideal ancj, rigid norm which disciplines politi-
cal socialism, and which saves it from the
elastic, vaporous, inconclusive uncertainties
of sentimental socialism.

The history of animal life has only found its
positive explanation in the great Darwinian
law of the struggle for existence; it alone permits
us to determine the natural causes of birth, of
evolution and of the disappearance of veget-
able and animal species from palseontological
times to our days. In the same manner the
history of human life only finds its explanation
in the great Marxian law of the struggle. of the
classes. Thanks to it the annals of primitive
humanity, barbarous and civilised, cease from
being a capricious and superficial kaleidoscope

63

of individual episodes, and form a grand and
fateful drama, determined — consciously or
unconsciously, in its most intimate details
as in its catastrophes — by economic conditions,
which form the physical and indispensable
basis of life, and by the struggle of the classes
to conquer and preserve the economic forces
on which all the others necessarily depend —
political, juridical, and moral.

I shall have an opportunity when studying
the relations of sociology and socialism of
speaking more at length of this great concep-
tion which is the imperishable glory of Marx
and which secures for him in sociology the
place that Darwin occupies in biology and
Spencer in natural philosophy.

For the moment it is sufficient for me to note
a new point of contrast between Darwinism
and socialism. The expression, " struggle of
classes," so antipathetic at the first sound (and
I confess that I felt this impression when I
had not yet seized the scientific spirit of the
Marxian theory) gives us, if we understand it
exactly, the first law of human history and,
therefore, it alone can give us the certain
norm of the coming of the new phase of
evolution which socialism foresees and which
it endeavours to hasten.

Struggle of the classes — that is to say, that
human society like all other living organisms
is not a homogeneous whole, the sum of a
number, more or less great, of individuals ; it
is, on the contrary, a living organism which
is the resultant of different parts and always

64

more or less differentiated according as the
degree of social evolution is raised.

Just as a protozoon is composed almost ex-
clusively of albuminous gelatine whilst a
mammal is composed of very diverse tissues ;
so a chiefless tribe of primitive savages is
composed of only a few families whose
aggregation results simply from propinquity,
whilst a civilised society of an historical
or contemporary epoch is composed of social
classes which differ one from the other, be
it by the physio -psychical constitution of
their components, or by the sum of their
habits, their tendencies, their personal, family
or social life.

These different classes can be arranged in
a rigorous fashion. In ancient India they go
from the Brahman to the Sudra ; in Europe of
the middle ages from the Emperor and the
Pope to the feudatory, the vassal and the
artisan, and an individual cannot pass from
one class to the other. Chance of birth alone
determines his social condition. It may hap-
pen that the legal etiquette will disappear, as
it happened in Europe and America after the
French Revolution, and exceptionally an in-
dividual may find his way from one class to
another, as molecules do by exosmosis and
endosmosis or, according to the expression of
M. Dumont, by a sort of social capillarity.
But in all cases these different classes- exist
as an assured reality, and they will resist
every attempt at levelling by laws as long as
the fundament reason for their difference
remains.

65

Karl Marx has proved the truth of this
theory better than anyone else, by the mass of
sociological observations which he has taken
from the most diverse economic conditions.

The names, the circumstances, the pheno-
mena of conflict can vary with each ofjthe
phases of social evolution, but the tragic
basis of history always appears in the anta-
gonism between those who keep the monopoly
of the means of production — and they are the
minority — and those who are dispossessed of
them — and these are the majority.

Warriors and shepherds, in primitive societies,
as soon as the family, and then the individual
appropriation of the land is substituted for
primitive collectivism, patricians and plebeians
—feudatories and vassals — nobles and common
people — bourgeois and proletarians; these are
all so many manifestations of the same fact ;
the monopoly of wealth on the one side and
productive work on the other.

Now, the great importance of the Marxian
law — the class struggle — consists chiefly in
this, that it indicates with great precision of
what the vital point of the social question
really consists and by what method we can
succeed in solving it.

As long as the economic basis of political,
legal, and moral life had not been demon-
strated by positive evidence, the aspirations of
most men towards a social amelioration were
directed vaguely to the demand for, and the
partial conquest of, some accessory means, such
as freedom of worship, political suffrage, public
instruction, etc., and certainly I have no wish

66

to deny the great utility of these conquests.

But the sancta sanctorum always remained
impenetrable to the eyes of the crowd, and as
economic power continued to be the privilege
of the few, all the conquests, all the concessions,
were without real basis, separated as they were
from the solid and fructifying foundation
which can alone give life and durable force.

Now that socialism has shown, even before
Marx, but never with so much scientific pre-
cision, that individual appropriation, private
ownership of land and of the means of pro-
duction, is the vital point of the question, the
problem is laid down in precise terms in the
consciousness of contemporary humanity.

What method must be employed to abolish
this monopoly of economic power and the
mass of pains and evils, of hatred and iniquity,
which is the result of it ?

The method of the "class struggle" setting
out from this positive datum that each class
tends to preserve and increase the advantages
and privileges acquired, teaches the class
deprived of economic power that in order to
conquer it, the struggle (we will concern our-
selves farther on with the mode of this
struggle) must be a struggle of class against
class and not of person against person.

Hatred, the death of such or such in-
dividual belonging to the governing class,
does not advance by one step the solution of
the problem. It rather retards it because it
provokes a reaction in public feeling against
personal violence, and it violates the prin-
ciple of respect for the human being which

67

socialism proclaims aloud for the benefit of
all and against all opponents. The solution of
the problem does not become easier because
the existing abnormal conditions which be-
comes more and more acute — misery of the
masses and enjoyment of the few — is not the
result of the ill will of such or such an
individual.

On this side again socialism is, in fact, in
complete accord with positive science, which
denies the free will of man and sees in human
activity, individual and collective, a necessary
effect, determined at the same time by
conditions of race and environment.*

Crime, suicide, madness, misery, are not the
fruit of free will, of the individual fault, as
metaphysical spiritualism believes ; and it is
no more a result of free will, a fault of the
individual capitalist, if the workman is badly
paid, if he is without work, if he is miserable.

All social phenomena are the necessary
resultants of historic conditions and of en-
vironment. In the modern world the facility
and the greater frequency of intercourse
between all parts of the earth have drawn
still closer the dependence of every action —

* Separating myself from the two exclusive arguments
that civilisation is a consequence of race or a product of
the environment, I have always maintained — by my
theory of the natural factors of criminality — that it is the
resultant of the combined action of race and environment.

Amongst the recent works which maintain the argument
of the exclusive or predominant influence of race must be
mentioned Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples, London,
1899. This work is, however, rather superficial. I refer
for a more detailed examination of these two arguments
to the fourth chapter of my book, Omicidio nell' antro-
Pologia criminale, Turin, 1894.

68

economic, political, legal, moral, artistic or
scientific — on the most distant and most
indirect conditions of earthly life.

The present organisation of private owner-
ship without any limit to family inheritance
and personal accumulation ; the continual
and always more complete application of
scientific discoveries to men's work in the
transformation of matter, the telegraph and
steam, the always extending migrations of
men — cause the existence of a family of
peasants, of workmen, of small tradesmen, to
be united by invisible but tenacious threads
to the life of the world, and the crop of
coffee, of cotton, or of corn in the most
distant countries has its effect on all parts of
the civilised world, just as the decrease or
increase of solar spots forms a co- efficient of
periodical agricultural crises and directly
influences the lot of millions of men.

This grand scientific conception of "the
unity of physical forces " according to the
expression of P. Secchi, or of universal
solidarity, throws far from it the childish
conception which makes free will and the
individual the cause of human phenomena.

If a socialist proposed, even for a philan-
thropic object, to equip a factory for giving
work to the unemployed, and if he produced
articles abandoned by fashion and general
consumption, he would soon be brought to
bankruptcy by an inevitable consequence of
economic laws in spite of his philanthropic
intentions.

Or if a socialist wished to give the work-

69

people of his establishment wages two or
three times higher than the current rate, he
would evidently meet with the same fate,
because he would meet with the same
economic laws and he would be obliged to
sell his goods at a loss or keep them unsold in
his shops owing to his price for equal qualities
being higher than the market rate.

He would be declared a bankrupt, and the
world would bring him no other consolation
than the epithet of worthy man, and, in this
phase of " commercial morality,"* we know
what this expression signifies.

Beyond the personal relations more or less
cordial between capitalists and workers, their
respective economic condition is inevitably
determined by the present organisation,
according to the law of surplus value which
has allowed Marx to explain in an irrefutable
manner how the capitalist can accumulate
riches without working — because the workman
produces in his day's work an equivalent of
wealth greater than the wages received, and
the surplus of the product forms the gratuitous
profit of the capitalist, even if one deducts the
salary for his technical and administrative
management.

The land left to sun and rain does not
produce by itself corn or wine. The minerals

* I make use of the expression "commercial morality"
which M. Letourneau has employed in his book on
L'tvolution de la morale, Paris, 1887. In his positive
study of facts concerning morality, M. Letourneau has
distinguished four phases — animal morality, savage
morality, barbarian morality, commercial or bourgeois
morality ; to these phases will succeed a phase of superior
morality which Malon had called social morality.

70

do not come forth by themselves from the
bowels of the earth. A bag of crowns shut
up in a strong box does not produce crowns
as a cow does calves.

The production of wealth results only from
a transformation of matter wrought by human
labour. And it is only because the peasant
cultivates the land, that the miner extracts
minerals, that the workman sets machines in
motion, that the chemist makes experiments
in his laboratory, that the engineer invents
machines, that the capitalist or the landlord,
although the wealth inherited from his father
has cost him no work and no effort if he is an
absentee, can each year enjoy riches that
others have produced for him in exchange for
a miserable home, insufficient food, very often
poisoned by vapours of rivers or marshes, by
the gases of mines, and by the dust of factories
— in a word for a wage which is always
insufficient to secure them an existence worthy
of a human being.

Even under a regime of fully developed
small farming* — which has been called a form
of practical socialism — the question always
arises by what miracle the landlord, who does
not work, sees corn, oil, and wine arrive in his
house in sufficient quantities to enable him to
live comfortably, whilst the farmer is forced

* [The system here indicated is the metayer which John
Stuart Mill defined as that under which "the labourer or
peasant makes his engagement directly with the land-
owner, and pays, not a fixed rent, either in money or in
kind, but a certain proportion of the produce, or rather
of what remains of the produce after deducting what is
considered necessary to keep up the stock." cf. Mill's
Political Economy, bk. ii., chap. viii. — ED.]

71

to work daily in order to wrest from the land
that which enables him and his family to live
miserably.

And small farming gives him at least the
tranquilising assurance that he will reach
the end of the year without experiencing all
the terrors of the enforced slack season to
which the workers not properly belonging to
the country and the workers of the town are
condemned.

But at the bottom the problem remains in
its entirety, and there is always a man who
lives in comfort without working, because ten
others live miserably whilst working.*

Such is the working of private property and
such are its effects without any intervention
of the will of individuals.

Also, every attempt made against such or
such individual is condemned to remain
sterile : it is the basis of society that must
be changed, it is individual property that must
be abolished, not by a division which would
lead to the most acute and paltry form of
private property, because a year afterwards
the persistence of the 'individualist aspect
would lead us to the status quo ante, to the
exclusive benefit of the most crafty and least
scrupulous.

* Certain persons still imbued with political artificial-
ism think that to solve the social question the system of
small farming must be generalised. They imagine with-
out putting it into words, a royal or presidential decree :
Clause i. All men shall become farmers !

And they do not think that if small farming, which
was the rule, is become the more and more rare excep-
tion, it must be~the necessary effect of natural causes.

The cause of the change lies in the fact that small

72

We must attain to the abolition ol private
property and to the establishment of collec-
tive and social property in the land and the
means of production. This substitution
cannot be the subject of a decree as people
suppose us to intend ; but it is being accom-
plished under our eyes each day, from hour to
hour, directly or indirectly.

Directly — because civilisation shows us the
continuous substitution of social possessions
and functions for individual possessions and
functions. Roads, the Post Office, railways,
museums, the lighting of towns, drinking
water, instruction, etc., which were only a few
years ago private possessions and functions,
have become social possessions and functions,
and it would be absurd to imagine that this
direct advance of socialism ought to stop
short to-day instead of progressively empha-
sising itself, since everything in modern life
moves with accelerating speed.

Indirectly — because it is the point to which
economic and bourgeois individualism tends.
The bourgeoisie, which borrows its name
from the inhabitants of the boroughs which
the feudal castle and the churches protected—

farming represents the petty agricultural industry, and
that it cannot struggle against the big agricultural indus-
try well furnished with machines, just as handwork has
not been able to resist the great manufacturing industries.
It is true that there are still to-day handicrafts in a few
villages, but these are rudimentary organs which only
represent a former phase, and which have no decisive
function in the economic world. They are like the rudi-
mentary organs of the higher animals, according to the
theory of Darwin — witnesses to epochs for ever passed.

The same Darwinian and economic law applies to
small farming, itself evidently destined for the same end
as handicrafts.

73

symbols of the class then dominant — is the
result of fruitful labour, conscious of what it
was aiming at, and of historic conditions that
have changed the economic trend of the
world (the discovery of America, for instance).
It made its revolution at the end of the i8th
century and acquired power. In the history
of the civilised world it has written a golden
page by its national epics and by its marvel-
lous applications of science to industry ; but
to-day it is wandering over the descending
curve of the parabola, and certain symptoms
point out to us its coming dissolution. Without
its disappearance, moreover, the establishment
of a new social phase will not be possible.

Economic individualism, carried to its last
consequences, necessarily causes the pro-
gressive augmentation of property in the
hands of an increasingly restricted number of
persons. The millionaire is a new word
which characterises the igth century, and it is
the clear impression of this phenomenon — in
which Henry George saw the historic law of
individualism — which causes the rich to be-
come more and more rich and the poor more
and more poor.**

Now it is evident that the more restricted
is the number of those who hold the land
and the means of production, the easier is
their expropriation — with or without indem-
nity— for the advantage of a single proprietor
who is, and who can only be, the community.

The land is the physical basis of the social
organism. U is then absurd that it should

* Henry George, Progress and Poverty, London, 1887.

74

belong to a few and not to the whole social
body ; it would not be more absurd if the
air we breathe were the monopoly of a few
proprietors.

That is indeed the supreme aim of socialism,
but we can evidently not attain it by aiming
at this or that landlord, this or that capitalist.
The method of the individualist struggle is
destined to remain sterile, or at least it exacts
an immense waste of forces to obtain only
partial and provisional results.

Also, those politicians who carry on their
business of daily or anecdotic protest, who
only see a struggle of individuals, and whose
work is without effect on the public or on
assemblies who become accustomed to it,
have on me the effect of fantastic hygienists,
who would try to render a marsh habitable
by killing the mosquitoes one by one with a
revolver, instead of adopting the method and
aim of rendering healthy the pestilential
marsh.

No personal struggles, no personal violence,
but a class struggle. The immense army of
workers of all trades and all professions must
be made conscious of these fundamental truths.
We must show them that their class interests
are in opposition to the interests of the class
which holds the economic power, and it is by
class conscious organisation that they will
conquer this economic power by means of
other public powers which contemporary
civilisation has secured to free peoples. One
can, however, foresee that in every country the
dominant class before yielding will diminish

75

or destroy even those public liberties which
were without danger when they were in the
hands of workmen not formed into a class
party, but at the tail of other purely political
parties which are as radical in secondary
questions as they are profoundly conservative
on the fundamental question of the economic
organisation of property.

The class struggle is, therefore, a struggle
of class against class, and a struggle, of course,
by the methods of which I shall shortly speak
when dealing with the four modes of social
transformation : evolution — revolution — re-
volt— personal violence. But it is a struggle
of class in the Darwinian sense which renews
in the history of man the grand drama of the
struggle for life among the species instead of
debasing ourselves to the savage and insig-
nificant fight of one individual with another.

We can stop here. The examination of the
relations between Darwinism and socialism
might lead us much farther, but it would
always eliminate the supposed contradiction
there is between the two currents of modern,
scientific thought, and it would affirm on the
contrary the intimate, natural and indissoluble
agreement there is between the two.

It is thus that the penetrating eye of
Virchow found a confirmation in Leopold
Jacoby.

"The same year when Darwin's book
appeared (1859), and setting out from /juite
a different direction, an identical impulse
was given to~ a very important development
of social science by a work which passed

76

unperceived for a long time, and which bore
for title : Criticism on Political Economy, by
Karl Marx — it was the precursor of Capital.

"What Darwin's book on the Origin of
Species is for the genesis and evolution of
unconscious nature up to man, the work of
Marx is for the genesis and evolution of the
community of human beings, of States, and
of the social forms of humanity."*

And that is why Germany, which has been
the most fruitful field for the development of
Darwinian theories, has been the same for
the conscious, disciplined propaganda of
socialist ideas. And that is precisely why at
Berlin in the libraries of socialist propaganda
the works of Charles Darwin occupy the place
of honour beside those of Karl Marx.|

* L. Jacoby, L'Idea dell' evoluzione in Bibliotheca dell'
economista, series III., vol. ix., part 2, p. 69.

t At the death of Darwin the Sozialdemokrat of 27
April, 1882, wrote : "The proletariat which is struggling
for its emancipation will always honour the memory of
Charles Darwin."

I know that in the last few years, perhaps in conse-
quence of the relations between Darwinism and social-
ism, the objections made to Darwin's theory by Ncegeli
have been taken up again, and more recently by
Weissmann on the hereditary transmissibility of acquired
characteristics. But all that only concerns this or that
detail of Darwinism, whilst the fundamental theory of
organic transformism remains unshaken.

PART II.
CHAPTER VIII.

EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM.

The theory of universal evolution, which —
apart from this or that detail more or less
debatable — really characterises the vital
trend of modern scientific thought, has also
appeared to be in absolute contradiction to
the theories and practical ideals of socialism.

Here the equivocation is evident.

If we mean by socialism this vague
complexus of sentimental aspirations so many
times crystallised in artificial Utopian
creations of a new human world, which by a
magical power was to substitute itself in one
day for the world in which we live, then it
is perfectly true that the 'scientific theory of
evolution condemns the prejudices and
illusions of political artificialism, always
romantic whether reactionary or revolutionary.

But, unfortunately for our adversaries, con-
temporary socialism is quite another thing
from the socialism that preceded the work of
Marx. Beyond the same sentiment of protest
against present iniquities and of aspirations
towards a better future there is nothing in
common between the two socialisms, either in
their logical structure or in their inductions,

78

unless it be the clear vision, mathematically
exact (and that indeed by virtue of the
theories of evolution), of the final social
organism — based on the collective ownership
of land and the means of production.

That is what will result very clearly from
the examination of the three principal contra-
dictions which it has been thought could be
raised between socialism and scientific
evolution.

Henceforth it is impossible not to see the
direct relation of Marxian socialism to
scientific evolution, when it is understood
that the former is only the logical and conse-
quential application of the theory of evolution
in the economic domain.

CHAPTER IX.

THE ORTHODOX ARGUMENT AND THE

SOCIALIST ARGUMENT IN THE LIGHT OF THE

THEORY OF EVOLUTION.

What does socialism in substance say? That
the present economic world cannot be
unchangeable and eternal, that it only
represents a transitory phase of social
evolution, and that a future phase, a world
otherwise organised, ought to succeed it.

That this new organisation must be collec-
tivist or socialist and no longer individualist,
that is what is derived as a final and positive
conclusion from the examination we have
made of Darwinism and socialism.

I must now prove that this fundamental
affirmation of socialism — leaving on one side
all the details of future organisation of which
I will speak further on — is in perfect harmony
with the experimental theory of evolution.

On what point are orthodox political
economy and socialism at complete variance ?
Political economy has maintained, and
maintains, that the laws of the production
and distribution of wealth 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 laws, that is to say,
that they are suitable to humanity for all
time and all places, and consequently that
they are unchangeable in their chief character-
istics, though they may be susceptible to
modifications in detail.

8o

Scientific socialism maintains, on the con-
trary, that the laws established by classic,
political economy, since Adam Smith, are
laws suitable to the present historic period of
the civilised world, that consequently they are
laws essentially relative to the [time in which
they have been analysed ; further, that just
as they no longer correspond with the facts if
one wishes to extend them to the historic past,
and still more to pre-historic and ante-historic
times, so they cannot have a claim to petrify
the social future.

Of these two fundamental arguments, the
orthodox argument and the socialist
argument, which is the one that best accords
with the scientific theory of universal
evolution ?

The answer cannot be doubtful.

The theory of evolution of which Herbert
Spencer is the real author, in applying to
sociology the relativist tendency which the
historic school had followed in the study of
law and politics (already heterodox on more
than one point), has shown that everything
changes, that the present, in the astronomical,
geological, biological, sociological order, is
only the resultant of many thousand trans-
formations, natural, necessary, incessant —
that the present differs from the past, and that
the future will certainly be different from the
present.

Spencerism has done nothing but bring an
enormous number of scientific proofs in all
branches of human knowledge to these two
abstract thoughts of Leibnitz and Hegel :

8i

"the present is the son of the past but it is the
father of the future," and "nothing is, every-
thing is becoming." Already geology since
Lyell had made this demonstration, in sub-
stituting for the traditional conception of
cataclysms, the scientific conception of the
gradual and daily transformation of the earth.

It is true that, in spite of his encylopaedic
knowledge, Herbert Spencer has not thoroughly
studied political economy, or that at least he
has not given his proofs as in the natural
sciences. That does not, however, hinder
socialism from being, in its fundamental con-
ception, only the logical application of the
scientific theory of natural evolution to
economic phenomena.

It is Karl Marx who, in 1859, in his Criticism
on Political Economy, and previously, in 1847,
in the celebrated Manifesto written in col-
laboration with Engels, nearly ten years before
the First Principles of Spencer was pub-
lished, finally completed in Capital in the
social domain the scientific revolution com-
menced by Darwin and Spencer.

Ancient metaphysics ' conceives morality
law, economics, as a collection of absolute
and eternal laws as Plato understood them.
It only takes into consideration the historic
world, and has as an instrument of research
only the logical imagination of the philo-
sopher. The generations which preceded us
have been imbued with this idea of absolute
natural laws struggling in the dualism of
matter andjnind. Positive science, on the
contrary, starts from the grand synthesis of

82

monism, that is to say, of the sole phenomenal
reality, matter and force being recognised as
inseparable and indestructible, developing
themselves in a continued movement, assum-
ing successively forms relative to time and
place. It has radically changed the trend of
modern thought and has directed it towards
universal evolution.

Morality, law, politics are only super-
structures, effects of the economic structure,
they vary with it from one clime to another,
from one century to another century.

This is the great discovery which Karl Marx
has set forth in his Criticism on Political
Economy. I will examine later what is
this sole source of economic conditions, but
now I am concerned with pointing out their
continued variability from the prehistoric
epoch to the historic epoch and in the
different periods of the latter.

Rules of morals, religious beliefs, legal,
civil, and penal institutions, political or-
ganisation ; everything changes and every-
thing is relative to the historic and material
environment which one is considering.

To kill one's parents is the greatest of
crimes in Europe and America ; it is, on the
contrary, a duty which religion sanctifies in
the island of Sumatra. Similarly, cannibalism
is still permitted in Central Africa, and it was
equally permitted in Europe and America in
prehistoric times.

The family is at first (as with animals) only
a sexual communism ; polyandry and a
matriarchate established themselves where

a scanty food supply only allowed a small
increase in the population ; we find polygamy
and a patriarchate at the time and in the place
where this fundamental economic reason does
not rule tyrannically. With historic times
appears the best and most advanced form,
monogamy, although that still needs to be
delivered from the absolutist conventionalism
of the indissoluble bond and of the prostitution
disguised and legalised (for economic reasons)
which sullies it in our epoch.

Why claim that the constitution of property
ought to remain eternally what it is now, un-
changeable in the midst of this gigantic
current of social institutions, and of moral
rules subject to continued and profound
evolutions and transformations? Property
alone should be subjected to no change, and
should remain petrified in its form of private
monopoly of the land and of the means of
production !

Such is the absurd claim of economic and
legal orthodoxy. To the irresistible state-
ments of the theory of evolution only this
single concession has been made: the accessory
rules may vary, the abuses may be diminished.
The principle itself is not to be touched, and
a few individuals may appropriate for them-
selves the land and the means of production
necessary for the life of the whole social
organism, which thus remains for ever under
the domination, more or less direct, of these
holders of the physical basis of life.*

* The partisans and opponents of free will are in
exactly the same position.

Ancient metaphysics granted to man (the unique

84

It suffices to state precisely the two funda-
mental theses — the theses of classic law and
economics and the thesis of economic and
juridical socialism — to decide thus without
further discussion this first point of the
controversy : in all cases the theory of
evolution is in perfect, incontestable agree-
ment with the inductions of socialism, and it
is, on the contrary, in opposition to the
affirmations of those who believe in economic
and juridical fixity.

marvellous exception in the whole universe) absolute
free will.

Modern physio-psychology refuses to man every kind of
free will in the name of the laws of natural causation.

There are found in an intermediate position those who,
tvhilst recognising that the free will of man is not abso-
lute, maintain that we must at least admit a little free
will because, otherwise, there is neither merit nor
demerit, virtue, nor vice, etc.

I dealt with this question in my first work : Teoria dell'
imputabilitd e negazione de libero arbitrio (Florence, 1878,
out of print), and in chap. iii. of my Criminal Sociology.

I only mention it here to show that even in the eco-
nomic social question, the struggle presents itself in the
same conditions, and that one can, therefore, predict a
similar, final solution.

The true Conservative inspired with metaphysical
tradition keeps to the ancient moral or economic ideas
in all their absolutism : he is at least logical.

The determinist, in the name of science, holds ideas
diametrically opposed in the domain of psychology as in
that of the economic or legal sciences.

The eclectic, in politics as in psychology, in political
economy as in law, is at bottom a Conservative, but he
thinks he evades difficulties because he makes some partial
concessions and saves appearances. But if eclecticism is
an attitude personally convenient, it is like hybridism,
sterile, and neither life nor science owes it anything.

Thus socialists logically claim that the political parties
are after all two in number : individualists (conservatives,
progressives, radicals) and socialists.

CHAPTER X.

THE LAW OF APPARENT RETROGRESSION AND
COLLECTIVE PROPERTY.

Let us admit, say our opponents, that in
demanding a social transformation socialism
is in apparent accord with the theory of
evolution, yet it does not follow that its
positive conclusions — notably the substitution
of social property for individual property —
are justified by this same theory. Much more,
they add, we maintain that these conclusions
are in absolute opposition to this very theory
and that they are consequently, at least,
Utopian and absurd.

Socialism and evolutionism would first be
in opposition in that the return to collective
property of the land would at the same time
be a return to the primitive, savage stage of
humanity, and socialism would indeed be a
change, but a change the wrong way, that is
to say against the current of social evolution
which has brought us from the primitive
collective ownership of the land to the present
individual ownership, which is a characteristic
of an advanced civilisation. Socialism would
then be a return to barbarism.

This objection contains a portion of truth
which cannot be denied : it justly notes that
collective property would be a return,
apparently, to the primitive social organisa-
tion. But the conclusion which is drawn is
absolutely false and unscientific because it
takes no account of a law very generally
neglected, but which is neither less true nor
less certain than social evolution.

86

There is a sociological law which a French
doctor of repute has indicated in studying
the relations of transformism and socialism.*
I have shown the truth and the importance of
this in my Criminal Sociology — before becom-
ing a militant socialist — and I have again
recently insisted upon it in my controversy
with M. Morselli on divorce.|

This law of apparent retrogression shows
that the reversion of social institutions to
primitive forms and characteristics is a con-
stant fact.

Before setting forth some evident illustra-
tions of this law, I will recall the fact that M.
Cognetti de Martiis, already in 1881, had had
a vague glimpse of this sociological law. His
work Forme primitive nelV evoluzione economica
(Turin 1881) so remarkable for the abund-
ance, the precision and the exactness of the
facts set forth, gave a glimpse in fact of the
possibility of the reappearance in the future
economic evolutions of the primitive forms
which marked its starting point.

I remember also often to have heard
Carducci, in his lessons at the University of
Bologna, affirm that ultimate progress of the
forms and subject matter of literature is often
only the reproduction of the forms and the
subject-matter of primitive Graeco-Oriental
literature ; similarly the modern scientific
theory of monism, the very soul of universal
evolution and the representative of the latest

* L. Dramard, Transformisme et socialisme, in the
Revue socialiste, January and February, 1885.

t Divorzio e sociologia in the Scuola positiva nella
giurisprudenza penale, Rome, 1893, No. 16.

87

positive and definite discipline of human
thought confronting external reality, suc-
ceeding the brilliant wandering of meta-
physics, is only a reversion to the ideas of
Greek philosophers and of Lucretius, the
great naturalistic poet.

The examples of this reversion to primitive
forms are only too evident and too numerous
even in the order of social institutions.

I have already spoken of religious evolution.
According to Hartmann, in the primitive
times of humanity happiness seemed realisable
in the existence of the individual. It did not
appear to be so later except in the life beyond
the tomb, and now the tendency is to carry it
back to humanity, but in the series of future
generations.

It is the same in the political domain, and
Spencer remarks* that the will of all — the
sovereign element in primitive humanity-r-
yields little by little to the will of one, then
to those of a few (these are the different aris-
tocracies, military, hereditary, professional,
feudal), and it tends finally to become sovereign
with the progress of democracy, universal
suffrage, referendum, direct legislation by the
people, etc.

The right to punish, a simple function of
defence in primitive humanity, tendsito become
such again. It has freed itself from every
teleological pretension of distributive justice
which the illusion of free will had superposed
on the natural foundation of defence.
Scientific researches into crime, as a natural

* Sociology III. chapter 5.

8*

and social phenomenon, have shown to-day
how absurd and illegitimate was the preten-
sion of the legislator and the judge to weigh
and measure the " fault " of the delinquent in
order that the punishment might be an exact
counterpoise, instead of contenting themselves
with excluding from civil society temporarily
or perpetually those individuals who cannot
adapt themselves to its necessities, as one does
with lunatics or those afflicted with con-
tagious diseases.

The same with marriage. The free right of
dissolution which was recognised in primitive
society has been gradually replaced by the
absolute formulae of theology and spiritualism
which imagine that " free will " can fix the
destiny of a person by a monosyllable pro-
nounced at a moment of such unstable
psychical equilibrium as is the period of
betrothal and marriage. Later, the reversion
to the spontaneous and primitive form of
consent is imposed and the matrimonial union
with the custom continually more frequent and
easy of divorce returns to its origin and gives
to the family, that is to say to the social cell,
a healthier constitution.

This same phenomenon is established in
property. Spencer himself has been forced to
recognise that there was a fatal tendency to a
reversion to a primitive collectivism when the
appropriation of the land, at first for the family
then for industrial purposes as he has himself
shown, has attained its culminating point, so
that in certain countries (Torrens Act in
Australia) the land has become a sort of

personal property transmissible, like the shares
of a joint stock company. Here is what an
individualist like Herbert Spencer writes as a
conclusive argument: "At first sight it seems
fairly inferable that the absolute ownership of
land by private persons must be the ultimate
state which industrialism brings about. But
though industrialism has thus far tended to
individualise possession of land, while indivi-
dualising all other possession, it maybe doubted
tvhether 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 recognise 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 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 ownership of man by
man was an ownership in course of being
permanently established ;* yet we see that a
later stage of civilisation, reversing this
process, has destroyed ownership of man by

* It is known that Aristotle, taking for an absolute
sociological law a law relative to his time, affirmed that
slavery was a natural institution, and that men were
distinguished by nature as free men and slaves.

90

man. Similarly, at a stage still more ad-
vanced, it may be that private ownership of
land will disappear."*

Besides, this process of the socialisation of
property, although partial and accessory, is
so evident and continuous that it would be
denying what is an actual fact to maintain
that the economic and consequently the
juridical tendency of the organisation of
property is not in the direction of an ever
greater augmentation of the interests and
rights of the aggregate of individuals over
those of the single individual : this prepon-
deratering tendency of to-day will replace
completely, by an inevitable process of evolu-
tion, the ownership of land and the means of
production.

The fundamental thesis of socialism is then,
to repeat it once more, in perfect accord with

* Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. 2, part 5, chap. 15.
This idea which Spencer had expressed in 1850 in his
Social Statics is found again in his recent work, Justice,
chapter xi., appendix B. It is true that he has made a
step backwards. He thinks that the amount of the
indemnity to be given to the present owners of the land
would be so great that it would render almost impossible
the nationalisation of the land, which, in 1881, Henry
George considered as the only remedy, and which Glad-
stone 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
community are the supreme owners of the land — an infer-
ence harmonising with legal doctrine, and daily acted upon
in legislation — a fuller consideration of the matter has led
me to the conclusion that individual ownership, subject
to State-suzerainty, should be maintained." The "fuller
study" which Spencer has made in Justice (and in
parenthesis this work constitutes with his Positive and
Negative Benevolence [Parts V. and VI. of The Principles
of Ethics, vol. ii. — ED.], a mournful document of senile
involved reasoning from which even Mr. H. Spencer has
not been able to escape ; in addition, his subjective dryness

91

this sociological law of apparent retrogression ,
the natural causes of which M. Loria has
admirably analysed : Primitive humanity
borrows from surrounding nature the funda-
mental and most simple lines of its thought
and life ; then the progress of intelligence and
complexity, increasing by a law of evolution,
gives us an analytical development of the
principal elements contained in the first germs
of each institution ; this analytical develop-
ment is often, once it is finished, antagonistic
to each of the elements ; humanity itself,
having reached a certain stage of evolution,
recomposes in a final synthesis these different

forms a strange contrast to the marvellous wealth of posi-
tive ideas in his first works) — is founded on two arguments,
(i) the present landowners are not the direct descendants
of the first conquerors : they have acquired their properties
generally by free contract ; (2) Society would have a right
to the ownership of the virgin soil, as it was before the
clearing, the improvements, the buildings made by private
owners : the indemnity which ought to be paid for these
improvements would mount to an enormous figure.

We must answer that the first argument would hold good
if socialism proposed to punish the present landowners,
but the question is put otherwise : society recognises the
dispossession of holders of land as of "public benefit,"
the individual right must bow to the social right, as
happens, moreover, at present, whilst reserving the ques-
tion of indemnity. In order to answer the second question
we must not forget that the improvements are not the
exclusive work of the personal activity of the landowners.
There is first the enormous accumulation of labour and
blood which numerous generations of workers, for the
benefit of others, have left on the soil to put it in its
present state of culture ; there is also this fact that society
itself, social life, has been a large co-efficient of these
improvements since the good state of the public roads,
railways, the use of machines in agriculture, etc., have
procured for landowners important increments, free of
cost to them, in the value of their lands.

Why then, iLwe consider the amount and the form of

the indemnity, should this indemnity be total and absolute ?

But even to-day if a landowner in consequence of diverse

9,

elements and thus returns to its primitive
point of departure.!

This return to the primitive form is not,
however, a repetition pure and simple. So we
call it the law of apparent retrogression and
that takes away all value from the objection
of the "return to primitive barbarism." It is
not a repetition pure and simple, but the end
of a cycle, of a great rhythm, as M. Asturaro
recently said, which cannot but preserve the
effects and conquests of the long prior
evolution in what they possess of vitality and
fruitfulness, and the final outcome is far
superior, in its objective reality and its effect
on the human mind, to the primitive embryo
which it resembles.

The course of social evolution is not repre-
sented by a closed circle, which, like the
serpent of the ancient symbol, cuts off all hope
of a better future ; but according to the image
of Goethe, it is represented by a spiral which
seems to come back on itself but which
always advances and rises.

circumstances, of memories associated with his land, for
example, values it at a sentimental price, would he not be
forced to give it up without being able to exact payment
of this sentimental price? It will be the same with the
collective dispossession which, moreover, is facilitated by
the progressive concentration of land in the hands of a
few large landowners. It will suffice to secure to these
landowners during their days a comfortable and tranquil
life in order that the indemnity should answer to all the
exigencies of the most rigorous equity.

t Loria, The Economic Basis of Society.

This law of apparent retrogression is sufficient to
answer the greater number of the rather too superficial
criticisms which M. Guyot makes on socialism in The
Tyranny of Socialism, London, 1894.

CHAPTER XI.

SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY.

The conclusion of the preceding chapter
will be of use to us in examining the second
contradiction which it is held exists between
socialism and the theory of evolution. It is
affirmed and repeated in every way that
socialism forms a tyranny of a new kind
which will destroy all the benefits of the liberty
so painfully won in our century at the price
of so many sacrifices and so many martyrs.

I have already shown in speaking of
anthropological inequalities that socialism
will on the contrary secure to all individuals
the conditions of human existence, and the
possibility of developing their own personality
more freely and more completely.

It will suffice for me here to recall another
law which the scientific theory of evolution
has established, to prove (because I cannot in
this monograph enter into the details) that it
is wrong to suppose that the advent of social-
ism will result in the suppression of the living
and fructifying part of personal and political
liberty.

It is a law of natural evolution remarkably
illustrated by M. Ardigo,* that no subsequent
phase of natural and social evolution destroys
the vital and fructifying manifestations of
preceding phases, but on the contrary, that
it continues their existence in so far as they
are vital and eliminate only the pathological
manifestations.

* Ardig6, La formazione naturale, vol. H. of his opere
filosofiche, Padua, 1887.

94

In biological evolution the manifestations
of vegetable life do not efface the first dawn of
life which is already seen in the crystallisation
of minerals, anymore than the manifestations
of animal life efface those of vegetable life.
The human form of life also leaves in existence
the forms and links which precede it in the
great series of living beings, but much more
do the later developed forms live in proportion
to whether they are the product of primitive
forms, and co- exist with them.

Social evolution follows the same law, and
this is precisely the interpretation which
scientific evolutionism gives of the transition
times. They do not eliminate the conquests
of preceding civilisation, but, on the contrary,
they preserve the vital part of them and
fructify them for the new birth of a fresh
civilisation.

This law which governs the grand develop-
ment of social life, rules equally the destiny
and the course of all social institutions.

One phase of social evolution in succeeding
another eliminates, it is true, the non-vital
parts, the pathological products of preceding
institutions, but it preserves and develops the
healthy and fructifying parts whilst it always
raises higher the physical and moral diapason
of humanity.

By this natural process the great river of
humanity has come forth from the virgin
forests of savage life, has developed majesti-
cally in the periods of barbarism and of the
present civilisation, superior in certain aspects
to the preceding phases of social life, but in

95

many others stained by the very products of
its own degeneracy as I have mentioned con-
cerning backward social selections.

For example, it is certain that the workmen
of the contemporary period of bourgeois
civilisation have generally a physical and
moral existence superior to that of past
centuries ; but it cannot, however, be denied
that their condition as free wage earners is
inferior in more than one point 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 an almost
bestial life ; but it was to the interest of the
master to secure to him at least his daily
bread, for the slave was part of his patrimony
like his oxen and horses.

Similarly, the serf of the soil, in the Middle
Ages, enjoyed certain customary rights which
attached him to the land and secured to him at
least — except in case of scarcity — daily bread.
The free wage earner of the modern world,
on the contrary, is always condemned to
labour not fit for a human being both by its
length and its character. This is the justifica-
tion for the claim for an eight hours' day,
which can already reckon more than one
victory, and which is destined to a certain
triumph. As no permanent juridical relation
connects him either with the capitalist land-
lord, or with the land, his daily bread is not
secured to him, because the employer has no
longer any interest in feeding and maintaining

96

the workers in his factory or his field. The
death or the illness of the worker can, in fact,
bring no diminution of his patrimony, and
he can always have recourse to the inexhaus-
tible crowd of proletarians which the slack
season offers him in the market.

This is why — not because the present em-
ployers are more wicked than those of the
past, but because even the moral sentiments
are a product of the economic condition — the
landowner, or the steward of his estate, will
hasten to call a veterinary surgeon if the ox
in his stall is taken ill, so that he may avoid
the loss of so much capital, while he shows no
eagerness in having a doctor called if it is his
drover's son who is attacked.

Certainly there may be (and there are
exceptions more or less frequent) a landowner
who is a contradiction to this rule, especially
when he lives in daily contact with his
workers. It cannot be denied further that the
rich classes are sometimes troubled with the
spirit of beneficence — even without the "charity
fad,'1 and that they thus sooth the inward voice
of moral uneasiness which troubles them, but
the inexorable rule is still this : with the
modern form of industry the worker has con-
quered political freedom, the right of a vote,
of association, etc. (which he is allowed to
exercise as long as he does not unite to form a
class party which holds an intelligent con-
ception of the essential point of the social
question) but he has lost the security of his
daily bread and his home.

Socialism wishes to give this security to all

97

individuals — and it proves the mathematical
possibility of this by the substitution of the
social ownership for the individual ownership
of the means of production ; but that does not
mean that socialism will cause the disappear-
ance of all the useful and truly fructifying
conquests of the present or the preceding
phases of civilisation.

Here is a characteristic example: the inven-
tion of industrial and agricultural machines.
This marvellous application of science to the
transformation of natural forces which ought
to have only beneficial consequences, has
entailed, and entails still, the misery and ruin
of thousands and thousands of workers. The
substitution of machines for human labour
has inevitably condemned masses of the work-
ing classes to the tortures of forced slack
seasons and to the hard law of a minimum
wage, scarcely sufficient to keep them from
dying of hunger.

The first instinctive reaction of these un-
fortunates has been, and, unhappily, still is,
to destroy the machines, and see in them only
a means of undeserved damnation.

But the destruction of the machines would
really be only a pure and simple reversion to
barbarism, and that is not the desire of
socialism, which represents a higher plane of
human civilisation.

And this is how socialism alone can solve
this melancholy difficulty. Economic indi-
vidualism cannot do this by employing always
new machines, because therein is an evident
and irresistible advantage for the capitalist.

98

It is necessary — and there is no other
solution — that the machines should become
collective or social property. Then, evidently,
they will have no other effect than to diminish
the sum total of work and of muscular effort
necessary to produce a given quantity of
products. And thus each workman will see
his daily portion of work diminish, and his
existence will continually and increasingly
rise to one worthy of a human creature.

This effect is already partially established
when, for example, several small landowners
found co-operative societies for the purchase
of machines for thrashing corn. If workmen
or peasants came to join the small landowners
in a great brotherly co-operation (and this will
only be possible when the land shall have
become social property), and if the machines
were municipal property, for example, like
the fire engines, and if the community let
them be used for field work, the machines
would not have an unhappy repelling effect,
and all men would see in them deliverers.

It is thus that socialism, because it repre-
sents a higher phase of human evolution
would only eliminate from the present phase
the evil products of our unbridled economic
individualism, which creates on the one side
millionaires or those contractors who enrich
themselves in a few years by possessing them-
selves, according to forms more or less fore-
seen by the penal code, of public funds, and
which on the other side accumulates enormous
masses of miserable men in the lowest parts
of the great cities or in the houses of straw

99

and mud, which reproduce in the Basilicate,
the quarters of the Roman helots, or in the
valley of the Po, the Australian aborigines'
huts.*

No intelligent socialist has ever dreamt of
refusing to recognise all that the bourgeoisie
has done for human civilisation, or of tearing
out the pages of gold that it has written in
the history of the civilised world by its
national epics, its marvellous applications of
science to industry, and by the commercial
and intellectual relations it has developed
among the nations.

These are definitive" conquests of human
progress, and socialism no more denies them
than it wishes to destroy them. It accords a
just tribute of gratitude to the noble pioneers
who have realised them. The attitude of
socialism with respect to the bourgeoisie might
be compared with that of atheists who do not
wish to refuse their admiration for, or to
destroy a picture of Raphael or a statue of
Michael Angelo, because these works of art
represent and give the seal of eternity to
religious legends.

But socialism sees in the present bourgeois
civilisation, which has reached its decline, the
painful symptoms of an irremediable dissolu-
tion, and it claims that the social organism
must be delivered from its infectious venom,
and that can be done, not by freeing it from
such or such a bankrupt, from such or such a

* My master, Pietro Ellero, has given in La Tirranide
borghese an eloquent description of this social and
political pathology as it concerns Italy.

TOO

corrupt functionary, from such or such a dis-
honest contractor — but by going to the root of
the evil, to the uncontestable source of virulent
infection. By radically transforming the
regime — by the substitution of social owner-
ship for private ownership — the healthy and
vital forces of human society must be renewed,
in order that it may rise to a higher phase of
civilisation. Then the privileged will cer-
tainly not be able to pass their lives in
idleness, luxury, and debauchery, and they
will have to resolve to lead a laborious and
less pompous life : but the immense majority
of men will rise to serene dignity, to security,
to a happy fraternity, instead of living in the
sufferings, the anguish, and the ill will of the
present.

We can give an analogous answer to the
hackneyed objection that socialism will sup-
press all liberty — this objection repeated to
satiety by all those who conceal under the
colours of political liberty more or less con-
scious tendencies to economic conservatism.

Is not this repugnance which many persons,
even with good faith, feel towards socialism
in the name of liberty, the manifestation of
another law of human evolution which Herbert
Spencer has thus formulated : " Every progress
realised is an obstacle to further progress"?

It is indeed a natural, psychological .ten-
dency, which one might call " fetich-ist," to
refuse to consider the ideal attained, the pro-
gress realised as a simple instrument and
point of departure for other progress and other
ideals, and to stop in "fetichist" adoration

IO1

of a point reached which appears to have
exhausted every other ideal, every other
aspiration.

Just the same as the savage adores the fruit
tree, from which he receives benefits, for itself
and not for the fruits which it can give, and
finishes by making a fetich of it, an idol not
to be touched, and therefore sterile ; just as
the miser who has learnt in our individualist
world the value of money, finishes by worship-
ping money in itself and for itself like a fetich
or an idol, and keeps it hidden in a strong box
where it is sterile, instead of using it as a
means of procuring for himself fresh pleasures;
in the same way the sincere liberal, the son of
the French Revolution, has made of liberty
an idol which has its end in itself, a sterile
fetich, instead of using it as a means for new
conquests and to realise new ideals.

We can understand that under a regime of
political tyranny the first and most urgent
ideal may have been the acquisition of liberty
and political sovereignty, and we, the last
comers, know how to be grateful for this
acquisition to the martyrs and heroes who
have insisted upon it at the price of their lives.

But liberty is not, and cannot be, an end in
itself.

Who wants the liberty of public meeting or
the liberty of thought if his stomach has not
its daily bread, and if millions of individuals
have their moral force paralysed in conse-
quence of bodily and cerebral anaemia ?

What is the worth of a platonic participa-
tion in political government, the right to vote,

102

if the people are kept slaves to misery, to
slack seasons, to sharp or chronic hunger ?

Liberty for liberty's sake — that is, progress
attained opposing itself to progress to come
— is a sort of political self pollution : it is
impotence in face of the fresh necessities of
life.

Socialism answers that it does not wish to
suppress the liberty gloriously acquired by the
bourgeois world in 1879 any more than the
subsequent phase effaces the conquests of the
preceding phases of social evolution, but it
wishes that the workers after having acquired
a consciousness of the interests and needs of
their class should make use of this liberty to
realise a more equitable and more humane
social organisation.

However, it is only too incontestable that,
given individual ownership, and therefore the
monopoly of economic power, the liberty of
him who is not a holder of this monopoly is
only an impotent and platonic toy. And
when the workers wish to use this liberty with
a clear consciousness of their class interests,
then the holders of political power are forced
to deny the great liberal principles, " the
principles of '89," by suppressing all public
liberty, and they imagine themselves able
thus to arrest the inevitable march of human
evolution.

It is necessary to say as much of another
accusation directed against socialists. " They
deny their country," it is said, "in the name
of internationalism."

That also is false.

io3

The movements of heroic nationalism which
in our century have reconquered for Italy and
Germany their unity and independence, have
been really a great advance, and we are
grateful to those who have given us a free
country.

But our country cannot become an obstacle
to the progress to come, to the fraternity of
all the peoples, freed from national hatreds
which are in reality either the residue of
barbarism or a simple theatrical scenery to
conceal the interests of capitalism which has
known how to realise for itself the greatest
internationalism.

It was true moral and social progress for us
to go beyond the phase of communal wars in
Italy and to feel we were all brothers of the
same nation ; it will be the same for us when
we shall have passed beyond the phase of
"patriotic" rivalries, to feel we are all
brothers of the same humanity.

It is, however, not difficult for us to pene-
trate, thanks to the historical key of class
interests, into the secret of the contradictions
in which the classes in power move. When
they form an international league — the banker
of London, thanks to the telegraph, is master
of the market at Pekin, New York, St.
Petersburg — it is a great advantage for this
dominant class to maintain the artificial
divisions between the workmen of the whole
world, or even only of old Europe, because
the division of workmen alone renders possible
the maintenance of the power of capitalists.
And to attain this end, it is sufficient to

io4

exploit the primitive and savage basis of
hatred for a foreigner.

But that does not mean that international
socialism may not be, even from this point of
view, a definite, moral scheme and an in-
evitable phase of human evolution.

In the same way and in consequence of the
same sociological law, it is not true to claim
that in constituting collective ownership,
socialism will do away with every kind of
individual ownership.

We must repeat again that one phase of
evolution cannot suppress all that has been
realised in preceding phases : it only suppresses
the manifestations which have ceased to be
vital, because they are in contradiction with
the new conditions of existence created by
the new phases.

In substituting for individual property
social ownership of the land and means of
production, it is evident that the ownership
of food necessary for the individual will not
have been suppressed, nor that of clothing
and objects of personal use which will con-
tinue to be articles of individual or family
consumption.

This form of individual property will then
always exist even in a collective regime,
because it is necessary and perfectly com-
patible with the social ownership of the land,
mines, factories, houses, machines, instruments
of work and means of transport.

Does the collective'ownership of libraries —
which we are seeing at work under our eyes
— take away from individuals the personal

105

use of rare or costly books which they could
not procure in any other manner, and do not
libraries considerably increase the use made of
a book compared with what it could render if
shut up in the private library of a useless
bibliophile ? In the same way the collective
ownership of the land and the means of pro-
duction, in furnishing to each the use of
machines, tools, and land, will only multiply
their utility a hundredfold.

And it must not be said that when men no
longer have the exclusive and transmissible
ownership of wealth they will no longer be
impelled to work because they will no longer
be moved by personal or family interest.

We see for example that even in our
present individualist world those residues of
collective ownership of the land — to which
Laveleye has so brilliantly called the atten-
tion of sociologists — continue to be cultivated
and yield a rent which is not inferior to that
which the lands yield that are held in private
ownership, although these agrarian commun-
ists or collectivists have only the right of
usage and of enjoyment."*

* M. Loria, in Economic Basis oj Society, London,
1894, Part i-t proves besides that in a society based on
collective ownership egoism of course still remains the
principal motive of human actions, but that it thus
brings about a social harmony of which it is the worst
enemy in an individualist regime.

Here is besides a very small but instructive example.
The means of transport in the large towns have followed
the ordinary process of progressive socialisation : first,
everyone went on foot, as an exception only a few rich
persons could have horses and carriages ; later the car-
riages were put at the service of the public with a tariff
(the fiacres, which have been used in Paris for more than

io6

If a few of these remains of collective
ownership are disappearing, or if their ad-
ministration is bad, that cannot be an argu-
ment against socialism, because it is easy to
understand that in the present economic
organisation, based on absolute individualism,
these organisms cannot find a medium which
furnishes them with the conditions of a
possible existence.!

It is like wishing a fish to live out of water

a century and which took their name from St. Fiacre
because the first carriage was stationed under his image) ;
then this tariff being very high brought about a further
socialisation through omnibuses and tramways. One step
more and the socialisation will be complete. Let the
service of carriages, omnibuses, tramways, etc., become
municipal and everyone will be able to use them freely as
they now use the electric light. It will be the same with
a national public service of railways.

But then — this is the individualist objection — everyone
will want to go in a carriage or in a tramway, and the
service having to satisfy all, will please none.

That is not exact. If the transformation were to be
made suddenly, this consequence might take place in a
transitory fashion. But already a partial or complete free
transport exists in a certain measure — on railways for
members of certain associations, on tramways for post-
men and telegraphists.

It also seems to us that everyone will want to go in a
tramway because now the impossibility of enjoying this
mode of locomotion brings with it the desire of forbidden
fruit. But when there is freedom to enjoy it (and one
could if necessary limit the right to this) another egoisti-
cal impulse will come into play, the physiological need of
walking, especially for well-nourished persons, and after
sedentary work.

And that is how individual egoism in this little example
of collective ownership would act in harmony with social
necessities.

t I occupied myself with this problem from the socialist
point of view in my address to the Chamber of Deputies
on i3th May, 1894. Propriety colletiva e lotta di classe
(e polemica con M. R. Imbriani), Milan, 1894.

or a mammal in an atmosphere deprived of
oxygen.

They are the same considerations that
condemn to a certain death all those famous
experiments of socialist, communist or
anarchist communities which people have
attempted to establish in different places as
" experiments in socialism." People do not
seem to have understood that such experiments
must inevitably fail, obliged as they are
to develop themselves in an individualist
economic and moral environment which
cannot supply them with the conditions of
physiological development to be found, on
the contrary, when the whole social organisa-
tion has been collectively arranged, that is to
say when society is socialised. *

At this moment the psychological indi-
vidual tendencies and aptitudes will adapt
themselves to their environment. It is natural
that in an individualist environment of free
competition in which each individual sees in
the other, if not an enemy, at least a com-
petitor, anti -social egoism must be the
tendency which inevitably develops most, by
necessity of the instinct of personal preser-
vation, especially in the last phases of a
civilisation which seems driven with full
steam if it is compared with the pacific and
slow individualism of past centuries.

* One can thus understand how unsubstantial is the
current reasoning of the opponents of socialism which
M. Mas6-Dari has gone over in // socialismo, Turin,
1890, § 9 : the failure of communistic or socialistic com-
munities is a proof from actual fact of " the instability
of a socialist arrangement."

io8

In a society where every one, in exchange for
intellectual or manual work rendered to the
society, will be assured of his daily bread, and
thus will be protected from daily anxiety, it
is evident that egoism will have far fewer
stimulants and opportunities of showing itself
than solidarity, sympathy, and altruism. Then
this pitiless maxim will cease to be true —
homo homini lupus — which, whether it is
avowed or not, poisons so large a portion of
our present life.

I cannot stay longer over these details, and I
finish here the examination of this second
alleged contradiction between socialism and
evolution by recalling that the sociological
law which declares that the subsequent phase
does not efface the vital and fructifying mani-
festations of preceding phases of evolution,
gives us a more positive idea of the social
organisation in the course of formation than
our opponents imagine who always think
they have to refute the romantic and senti-
mental socialism of the first half of the last
century.*

* That is for example what M. Yves Guyot does in
Les Principes de '89, Paris, 1894, when he affirmed in
the name of an individualistic psychology that "socialism
is restrictive, and individualism expansive." This argu-
ment is moreover partially true if it is reversed.

We shall find a good example in the question of an
eight hours' day, on which I point out the remarkable
monograph of M. Albertini, La Questions delle otto ore
di lavoro, Turin, 1894.

The vulgar psychology, which is sufficient for M.
Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism, book iii., chap, i., is
contented with superficial observations. It declares, for
example, that if the workman works for 12 hours he will
evidently produce a third more than if he works 8 hours,
and that is a reason why industrial capitalism is opposed

log

This shows how little substance there is in
the objection which an illustrious Italian
professor, M. Vanni, raised recently against
socialism in the name of a learned but vague
sociological eclecticism.

" Contemporary socialism does not identify
itself with individualism because it puts at
the basis of social organisation a principle
which is not that of the autonomy of the
individual, but its negation. If in spite of
that it affirms individualist ideas which are in
contradiction to its principles, that does not
mean that it has changed its nature or ceased

to, and opposes, the minimum programme of the three
eights — eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and
eight for meals and recreation.

A more scientific physio-psychological observation
proves on the contrary as I said long ago that " man is
a machine, but he does not work like a machine " in the
sense that man is a living and not an inorganic machine.

One understands that a locomotive or a sewing machine
does a third more work in twelve hours than in eight, but
man is a living machine subject to the laws of physical
mechanics, and also to those of biological mechanics.
Intellectual work, like muscular work, has not a uniform
continuity. In 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 non-living nature. At the
beginning the force or the speed is very feeble, then a
maximum of force or speed is attained, at length the end
comes with a very feeble force or speed.

With manual as with intellectual work there is a maxi-
mum after which the muscular and cerebral forces decline,
and then the work is carried on slowly and without vigour
until the end of the forced daily work. Add to that the
beneficent suggestive influence of the reduction of hours,
and it is easy to understand why the recent enquiries of
the English manufacturers into the excellent results, even
from the capitalist point of view, of the eight hours
reform are irrefutable. The workers are less fatigued
and the production has not diminished.

When these economic reforms and all those that rest on
a positive physio-psychology are carried into effect under

no

to be socialism ; it means simply that social-
ism lives on contradictions."!

When socialism, in assuring to each the
means of living, claims that it will permit the
affirmation and development of all individu-
alities, it does not fall into a contradiction of
principles, but being the next phase of human
civilisation, it cannot suppress or efface what
there is in the preceding phases that is
vital, that is to say, what is compatible with
the new social form. And so socialistic inter-
nationalism is not in contradiction with the
existence of One's country because it recog-
nises what is true in it, and only eliminates
the pathological part, the chauvinism ; and in
the same way socialism does not live on con-
tradiction, but, on the contrary, it follows the
fundamental laws of natural evolution if it
develops and preserves the vital part of
individualism, and if it only suppresses the
pathological manifestations which bring to
pass in the modern world, as Prampolini said,
that 90 per cent, of the cells of the social
organisation are condemned to anaemia,
because 10 per cent, are sick of hyperaemia
and hypertrophy.

a socialist regime, that is, without the friction and loss
of force brought about by capitalist individualism, it is
evident that they will have immense material and moral
advantages despite the d priori objections of the present
individualism which does not know how to observe, or
which forgets the profound reflex effects of, a change of
social environment on individual psychology.

t Icilio Vanni, " La Funzione pratica della filosofia
del diritto considerata in se e in rapporto al socialismo
contemporaneo." Bologna, 1894.

CHAPTER XII.

EVOLUTION, REVOLUTION, REVOLT, INDIVIDUAL
VIOLENCE, SOCIALISM, AND ANARCHY.

The last and gravest of the contradictions
which it is claimed are to be found between
socialism and the scientific theory of evolution,
is involved in the question how practical
socialism will be realised. Some think that
socialism ought to make known from now
in all its details the precise and symmetrical
framework of positive social organisation.
" Give me a practical description of the new
society and I will then decide if I should
prefer it to the present society."

Others — and it is a consequence of this first
false conception — imagine that socialism
wishes to change in a day the face of the
world, and that having gone to sleep in a
complete bourgeois world, we shall waken
next day in a complete socialist world.

How is it not seen, we then say, that all
this clashes absolutely with the law of evolu-
tion, whose two fundamental ideas — which
characterise the new direction of positive
thought, and which oppose to it the old meta-
physics— are precisely the natural and gradual
growth of all phenomena in all the domains
of the life of Jhe universe from astronomy to
sociology.

It is indisputable that these two objections

112

were well founded when they were urged
against what Engels called " Utopian
socialism."

When socialism — before Karl Marx — was
only the sentimental expression of a humani-
tarianism, as generous as it was careless of
the most elementary principles of scientific
positivism, it was quite natural to find its
partizans yielding to the impetuosity of their
heart, either in their vehement protestations
against social iniquities or their dreamy con-
templation of a better world to which their
imagination sought to give exact outlines
from Plato's "Republic" to Bellamy's "Look-
ing Backward."

It can readily be understood how easily
these structures laid themselves open to
criticism. This criticism was partly wrong,
moreover, because it started from the mental
habits proper to a modern environment, and
which will change with the change of environ-
ment ; but it was partly well founded, because
the enormous complexity of social phenomena
renders impossible every prophecy on the
small details of a social organisation which
will differ from ours more profoundly than our
present society differs from that of the Middle
Ages, because the bourgeois world, like the
society which preceded it, has maintained
individualism for a basis, whilst the socialist
world will have its guiding idea fundamen-
tally different.

These prophetic constructions of a new
social order are for the rest the natural product
of the political and social artificialism with

"3

which the most orthodox individualists are
also imbued because they imagine, as Spencer
has remarked, that human society is like
dough, to which law can give one form rather
than another without taking into account the
qualities, tendencies, and aptitudes, organic
and psychical, ethnological and historical, of
different peoples.

vSentimental socialism has furnished some
attempts at Utopian construction, but the
modern world of politics has presented, and is
presenting, still more of them with the absurd
and chaotic jumble of its laws and codes
which surround each man from his birth to
his death (even before he is born and after he
is dead) in an inextricable net of systems,
rules, decrees, and regulations which stifle
him like a silkworm in its cocoon.

And every day experience shows us that
our legislators, imbued with this political and
social artificialism, only copy the laws of the
most diverse nations, just as the fashion
comes from Paris or Berlin — instead of
considering scientifically,- from the particular
and living conditions of their country, its
positive interests in order to adapt laws to
them, laws which otherwise remain, as
numerous examples testify, a dead letter
because the reality of things does not permit
them to take root and fructify.0

* A typical example is furnished us by the new Italian
penal code in which is found, as I had written before its
application, no disposition which shows that it was made
to be adapted to the conditions of Italy. It might just as
well be a code made for Greece or Norway ; and we have

In the matter of social artificial construc-
tions socialists may say to Individualists : let
him who is without sin cast the first stone.

The true answer is quite another. Scientific
socialism represents a much more advanced
phase of socialist ideas : it is in complete
accord with positive modern science, and it
has completely abandoned the fantastic ideas
of prophesying from the present time what
human society will be in the new collectivist
organisation.

What scientific socialism can affirm, and
what it does affirm, with mathematical cer-
tainty, is that the current, the trajectory, of
human evolution is in a general sense indi-
cated and foreseen by socialism, that is to
say, in the sense of a continuous, progressive
preponderance of the interests and benefit of
the species over those of the individual — and
consequently in the sense of a continuous
socialisation of economic life and through it
of juridical, moral, and political life.

As to the small details of the new social
edifice, we cannot foresee them precisely, be-
cause the new social edifice will be, and is,
a natural and spontaneous product of human
evolution which is already in the process of

borrowed from the countries of the North the system of
solitary confinement when already these countries have
been able to recognise all the costly absurdity of, a plan
made to brutalise people.

Experience has unfortunately confirmed my previsions,
as the Commission of Judicial Statistics was obliged to
acknowledge.

Ferri, La Bancarotta del nuovo codice penale in Scuola
positiva, No. 9, 1894.

"5

formation, general lines of which are already
drawn and which is not an artificial con-
struction imagined by some utopist or
metaphysician.

The position is the same both for social
sciences and natural sciences.

In studying a human embryo of a few days,
or a few weeks, the biologist cannot say (it is
the celebrated law of Haeckel : the develop-
ment of the individual embryo reproduces in
miniature the ^diverse forms of development
of the animal species which have preceded it
in the zoological series) the biologist cannot
say if it will be male or female, and still less
if it will be a strong or feeble individual,
of a sanguine or nervous temperament,
intelligent or not.

He will only be able to give the general
lines of the future evolution of this individual,
and will leave to time the care of specifying
naturally and spontaneously, and according
to its organic, hereditary conditions and the
conditions of the environment in which it will
live, all the peculiarities of its personality.

This is what every socialist can and should
answer. It is the position taken by Bebel
in the German Reichstag,* in his answer to
those who wish to know now in detail what
the future State will be, and who, cleverly
profiting by the ingenuity of socialist romance
writers, criticise their artificial phantasies,
true in their general lines, but arbitrary in
their details.

* Bebel, Zukunftstaat und Sozialdemokratie, 1893.

u6

It would have been similar if, before the
French Revolution — which brought about
the birth of the bourgeois world prepared
and ripened in a prior evolution — the nobility
and the clergy, the classes then in power, had
asked the representatives of the Third
Estate — bourgeois by birth, aristocrats or
priests having embraced the cause of the
bourgeoisie against the privileges of their
caste, like the Marquis de Mirabeau and the
Abbe Sieves : — " But what will your new
world be ? Present us first with an exact
plan of it ; then we will decide."

The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, could
not have answered, because it could not have
foreseen what human society would become
in the nineteenth century : and that did not
prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking
place, because it represented the subsequent
phase, natural and inevitable, of an eternal
evolution. That is now the position of
socialism in the face of the bourgeois world.
And if this bourgeois world, only born a
century ago, is to have an historical cycle
much smaller than the feudal world (aristo-
cratic and clerical), it is simply because the
marvellous scientific progress of the nineteenth
century has multiplied a hundredfold the
rapidity of life in time and space, and because
civilised humanity traverses now in ten years
the same road that it took a century or two
to travel in the Middle Ages.

The continually accelerated march of human
evolution is, again, one of the laws established
and confirmed by positive social science.

H7

It is the artificial constructions of senti-
mental science which have given birth to this
idea — correct as far as it concerns them — that
socialism is synonymous with tyranny.

It is evident that if the new social organi-
sation is not the spontaneous form of human
evolution, but rather the artificial construction
proceeding fully developed from the brain of
a social architect, the latter would be obliged
to discipline the new social mechanism by
an infinite number of regulations, and by the
superior authority which it will give to a
directing spirit, individual or collective. It
can then be understood how such an organi-
sation gives our opponents, who only see in
the individualist world the advantages of
liberty, and who forget the evils which freely
spring from it, the impressions of a convent,
a regimentation, etc.*

Another artificial contemporary product —
State socialism — has confirmed this impres-
sion. At the bottom, it does not differ from
sentimental or Utopian socialism, and as
Liebknecht said at the Berlin Socialist Con-
gress in 1892, " It would be a State capitalism
which would join political slavery to economic
exploitation." State socialism is a symptom
of the irresistible power of scientific and demo-
cratic socialism — as is shown by the famous
rescripts of the Emperor William convoking an
international conference to solve (that is the
childish idea of the decree) the problems of

* It is this artificial socialism which Herbert Spencer
attacks in his essay From Freedom to Bondage, re-
published in the third volume of his Essays.

u8

labour, and by the famous encyclical letter on
" The Condition of Labour " of the very clever
Pope Leo, who knew how to run with the hare
and hunt with the hounds. But these imperial
rescripts, and these papal encyclicals — because
we can neither skip nor suppress the phases
of social evolution— can but fail in our
bourgeois, individualist, liberalist world.
Certainly it would not have displeased the
bourgeois world to strangle this vigorous con-
temporary socialism in the amorous embrace
of official artificialism and State socialism ;
for it had been perceived in Germany and
elsewhere that neither laws nor exceptional
repressions would be sufficient for this.*

All this arsenal of regulations and inspec-
tions has nothing to do with scientific
socialism, which foresees clearly that the
administration of the new social organisation
will not be more confused than the adminis-
tration of the State, the provinces, and the
parishes, is now, and will, on the contrary,
correspond far better with social benefit and
individual benefit, because it will be a natural
and not a parasitic product of the new social

* It is against State Socialism that the majority of
the individualist and anarchist objections of Spencer are
directed in The Man -versus the State, London, 1885. In
connection with this subject the celebrated controversy
between Spencer and Laveleye will still be remembered :
The State versus the Man, or Social Darwinism and
Christianity, in the Contemporary Review, 1885.

Larfargue in an article on Herbert Spencer and Social-
ism, published in The Times, and reproduced in the
Ere Nouvelle, 1894, nas not mentioned this distincti<yn
between scientific and State socialism, against which are
directed the individualist criticisms of Spencer.

119

organisation. Similarly the nervous system
of a mammal is the regulating apparatus of
its organism ; it is certainly more complex
than that of the organism of a fish or a
mollusc, but it has not because of that,
tyrannically stifled the autonomy of the other
organs and apparatus, or of the cells in their
living confederation.

It is then understood, that in order to refute
socialism, the current objections must not be
repeated against an artificial and sentimental
system which, I agree, may very well still
continue to exist in the nebulous mass of
popular ideas. But every day it loses ground
with the intelligent partisans — proletarian,
bourgeois or aristocratic — of scientific social-
ism, who armed, thanks to the impulse of
the genius of Marx, with all the most positive
of the inductions of modern science, triumphs
over the old objections which our opponents
still repeat from mental habit but which have
been left behind by contemporary knowledge
at the same time as Utopian socialism which
called them forth.

We must make the same answer to the
second part of the objection relating to the
mode in which the future of socialism will be
realised.

It is an inevitable and logical consequence
of Utopian and artificial socialism to think
that the constructive policy proposed by one
reformer or another ought, or can, be put in
practice on this day or the next by a decree.

In this sense it is quite true that the Utopian
illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition

120

to the positive law of evolution, and as such I
have attacked it in my work, Socialismo e
Criminalita, because at that time (1883) the
ideas of scientific socialism, or Marxian
socialism had not yet spread in Italy.

A political party and a scientific theory are
natural products which must pass through the
vital phases of infancy and youth before
attaining complete development. It was then
inevitable that before being scientific or posi-
tive, socialism in Italy, as in other countries,
passed through the infantile phases of class
exclusiveness (of manual workers alone), and of
the nebulous romanticism which, giving to the
word revolution a restricted and incomplete
meaning, has always flattered itself with this
illusion, that a social organism can be radi-
cally changed from orie day to the next with
four shots from a gun as a monarchial regime
can be changed into a republican regime.

But it is. infinitely easier to change the
political circumstances of a social organisa-
tion— because these have a minor influence on
the economic basis of social life — than to give
a new direction to this social life in its
economic constitution.

The processes of social transformation, as
well as under different names those of every
transformation in living beings, are : evolution
— revolution — revolt — individual violence.

A mineral or vegetable or animal species
can undergo in the cycle of its existence these
four processes.

As long as the structure and the volume of
the centre of crystallisation, the germ — the

121

embryo — gradually increase, we have a steady
and continued process of evolution, to which
must succeed in due time a process of revolu-
tion more or less prolonged, represented, for
example, by the separation of the whole
crystal from the mineral mass which surrounds
it, or by certain revolutionary phases of
vegetable or animal life, as, for example, the
moment of sexual reproduction. There can
equally take place in it a period of revolt, that
is to say of associated personal violence as is
often enough found with animal species that
live in a society ; there can also be found in
it isolated personal violence, as in the struggles
for the conquest of food or for the female with
animals of the same species.

These same processes are found in the human
world. By evolution, we must understand the
daily change almost imperceptible but con-
tinuous and inevitable ; by revolution, the
critical and decisive moment, more or less
prolonged, of an evolution which has reached
its climax ; by revolt, the partially collective
violence which breaks forth on the occasion
of such or such particular circumstance, at a
given point or moment ; by individual violence
the action of an individual against one or more
other individuals. This may be the effect of
the explosion of a fanatical passion or of
criminal instincts, or the manifestation of a
defect of mental equilibrium, connected with
the ideas most in vogue at a given political
or religious period.

We must first observe that whilst revolution
and evolution arise from social physiology,

122

revolt and individual violence arise from
social pathology.

These are, however, only natural and spon-
taneous processes, because, as Virchow has
shown, pathology is but the consequence of
physiology. Besides, pathological symptoms
have, or ought to have, a great diagnostic
value for the classes in power ; but the latter
unfortunately at each historical epoch, in the
moments of a political crisis as in those of a
social crisis, do not know how to invent any
other remedy than brutal repression, the guil-
lotine or the prison, and imagine themselves to
be able thus to cure the organic and constitu-
tional malady that troubles the social body.*

But it is incontestable in all cases that the
normal processes of social transformation and,
in consequence, the most fruitful and the most
sure, even if the slowest and least efficacious
in appearance, are evolution and revolution,
taking the latter in its exact and positive
sense, as the last phase of an evolution, and
not in the current and inexact sense of
tumultuous and violent revolt, f

* At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of
the Italian edition of this work, M. Crispi had just pro-
posed "some exceptional laws for the public security"
by which, seizing as a pretext some anarchist outrages,
he wished to strike at, and suppress, socialism.

Repressive laws can suppress men but not an idea. Has
the failure of the exceptional laws passed in Germany
against the socialist party been forgotten?

The number of crimes may be increased, public liberty
may be suppressed — but that is no remedy. Socialism
will none the less continue its march.

t Lombroso and Laschi, Le Crime politique, etc., and
the monograph of Elise*e Reclus, Evolution et Revolution.

133

It is evident, in fact, that Europe and
America are at the end of the igth century in
a period of revolution prepared by the evolu-
tion formed by the bourgeois organisation
itself, and followed by Utopian as by scientific
socialism. And we are even in the period of
social life which Bagehot calls " the age of
discussion,"* and we already observe what
Zola has called in Germinal the creaking
of the politico-social floor — all those symp-
toms which Taine has described in the
Ancien Regime in relating the history of the
twenty years which preceded 1 789. Repressive
measures not being able to serve any good
against the internal revolution that these
symptoms reveal, the only efficacious and
fruitful ones are laws of social reform
and prevention which, whilst making the
present safe, render less painful, as Marx said,
" the birth of the new society."

In this sense evolution and revolution con-
stitute the most fruitful and sure of social
metamorphoses. Human society, forming a
natural and living organism, like all other
organisms, cannot undergo sudden tranforma-
tions as those imagine who think we must
resort only, or by preference, to revolt and
personal violence to realise a new social
organisation. It is to me as though one could
imagine that a child or a young man could
in a day accomplish a biological evolution
— even in the revolutionary period of puberty

^.Bagehot, Physics and Politics,

124

— such as to immediately become adult.*
It is easy to understand how the man with-
out work, in the horrors of hunger, his brain
exhausted from want of nourishment, can
imagine that by stabbing a policeman, by
throwing a bomb, by making a barricade, or
by taking part in a rising, he is hastening the
realisation of a social ideal in which iniquity
will have disappeared.

And even without this case we can under-
stand that the impulsive force of sentiment
predominate with certain people, can drive
them by a generous impatience to some real
attempt — and not imaginary like those which
the police of all times and countries submit
to the repression of courts — to spread terror
among those who feel political or economic
power slipping from their hands.

But scientific socialism, notably in Germany
under the direct influence of Marxism, has
completely abandoned these old methods of
revolutionary romanticism. Often used, they
have always miscarried, and for that very
reason the dominant classes fear them no

* It is this lack of even elementary notions of geology,
of individual or collective biology, which causes many
men of the people with lively minds not disciplined in
scientific methods, to prefer to satisfy themselves with
the vagueness of the anarchical ideal even when they
repudiate the use of violent means.

I shall always recall as a typical example, a printer of
Florence, gentle and intelligent, who, after having heard
one of my lectures on Marxian socialism, confessed to me
that he no longer clung so much to his anarchist ideas,
though he had accepted up till then this programme :
"to pass from monarchy to anarchy."

Such is unfortunately the intellectual consistency of
many persons, who only call themselves anarchists
because the first ideas of social criticism have been
brought to them by some propagandist who fancies he is

125

longer because they are only light blows
localised against a fortress which has still a
power of resistance more than sufficient to
keep victorious, and by this victory to arrest
evolution momentarily, thanks to the process
of selection which eliminates the boldest and
strongest adversaries.

Marxian socialism is revolutionary in the
scientific sense of the word, and it is being
developed henceforth into thorough social
revolution. No one would, I think, deny that
the end of the igth century marks the critical
phase of the bourgeois evolution started with
all steam up, even in Italy, on the track of
individualist capitalism.

Marxian socialism has the frankness to say,
by the mouth of its most authoritative repre-
sentative, to the great suffering phalanx of the
modern proletariat that there is no magic
wand which transforms the world from one
day to the next, as one changes the scenes in a
theatre ; it says, on the contrary, repeating
the prophetic cry of Marx, "Proletarians of all
countries, unite " ; that the social revolution

preaching anarchy becauses he wishes to suppress "the
medal of the deputy," and delights in the double meaning
of the word "revolution."

Also, in my opinion, a more complete study of natural
sciences in the elementary and secondary schools — instead
of the classicism inoculated by Latin and Greek, which
does not temper young people for life, but sterilises them
in archaeological contemplation of togas and of the fasces
of lictors — might be the most efficacious antidote — much
better than repression — to the political individualist
romanticism of the "dagger of Brutus," or of the
"wisdom of Titus."

But unfortunately there are no reliable criteria in the
public instruction of the bourgeois world, and that only
confirms me in my affrmation : when anarchy descends
from above, anarchist sentiment mounts from below.

136

can only attaints aim if it is first brought
within the minds of the workers themselves
by a clear perception of their class interests,
and by the force which their union will give
them, and that they will not awaken one day
into a full socialist regime because divided
and inactive on 364 days of the year they
revolt on the 365th, or have recourse to some
act of personal violence.

That is what I call the psychology of the
"first prize." Many workmen, in fact,
imagine that, without doing anything to
form themselves into a class conscious party,
they will one day gain the first prize, the
social revolution, as the manna, it is said,
came from Heaven to the Hebrews.

Scientific socialism has noticed that the
power of transformation diminishes as it
passes from one- process to another, from
evolution to revolution, from the latter to
revolt, and from revolt to individual violence.
And because it concerns the transformation of
the whole of society in its economic basis, and
consequently in its juridical, political, and
moral organisation, the process of trans-
formation is all the more efficacious and the
better adapted as it is more social and less
individual.

Individualist parties are centred upon
personal considerations even in the daily
struggle ; socialism, on the contrary, is
collectivist even in that, because it knows that
the present organisation does not depend on
this or that individual, but on the whole of
society. And this is why, from another point

127

of view, charity, however generous it may be,
being necessarily personal and partial, cannot
be a remedy for the social (and therefore
collective) question of the distribution of
wealth.

In political questions which leave intact
the economic-social basis, we can understand
how, for instance, the exile of Napoleon III.
or of the Emperor Dom Pedro can set up a
republic. But this transformation does not
touch the foundation of social life, and the
Empire of Germany or the Monarchy of Italy
are socially bourgeois, just like the French
Republic or the Republic of North America,
because in spite of the political differences they
all belong to the same economic -social phase.

That is why the processes of evolution and
revolution, the only ones completely social or
collective, are the most efficacious, whilst
partial revolt, and still more individual
violence have only a very feeble power for
social transformation; they are besides anti-
social and anti -humane, because they revive
primitive savage instincts and they deny in
the person even of him whom they strike, the
principle with which they believe themselves
to be animated : the principle of respect for
human life and solidarity. Of what use is it
to hypnotise oneself with phrases, "propa-
ganda by deeds " and " immediate action " ?

One knows that anarchists, individualists,
" amorphists," and libertarians admit, as a
means of social transformation, individual
violence which extends from homicide to
robbery, or to taking advantage, even among

128

companions ; and it is then nothing more than
a political colouring given to some criminal
instincts which must not be confused
with political fanaticism — a very different
phenomenon — common to extreme and
romantic parties of all times. The positive
examination of each case in detail, with the
aid of anthropology and psychology, can alone
decide if the author of such or such violence
is a born criminal, an insane criminal, or a
criminal possessed by political fanaticism.

I have in fact always maintained, and I still
maintain, that the "political criminal," whom
certain persons wish to put in a special
category, does not constitute a particular
anthropological variety, but can be attached
to some one of the anthropological categories
of the criminals of ordinary law, and
especially to one of these three : the born
criminal from congenital tendency, the insane
criminal, the criminal from fanatical passion.

The history of the past and of recent times
offers us evident examples.

In the Middle Ages religious beliefs
preoccupied the minds of all and coloured the
criminal or mad excesses of many, or indeed
really determined some cases of " sanctity "
more or less hysterical.

At the end of our century (the igth) it is
politico-social questions which preoccupy, and
with what vehemence, the universal mind,
which is exalted by this universal contagion
that journalism creates with its great catch-
words, and it is these questions which colour
the criminal or insane excesses of many

unbalanced persons or which determine some
cases of fanaticism amongst men honest at
bottom but touched with hypersesthesia.

It is the politico-social questions, most
extreme in their form, which have at each
historic moment the most intense suggestive
power. In Italy it was Mazzini-ism or
Carbonarism sixty years ago ; socialism
twenty years ago ; now it is anarchism.

It is easy to understand that there has been
at each epoch, and following the ruling
tendency, cases of personal violence. Felice
Orsini, for example, is one of the martyrs of
the Italian revolution.

In each case of individual violence, if one
does not wish to keep to judgments necessarily
erroneous and born under the stimulus of
excitement, our conclusions should only be
the result of a physio-psychical examination
of its perpetrator, as for every other crime.

Felice Orsini was a political criminal from
passion. Amongst the anarchists of our day
who use bombs, or are assassins, can be found
the born criminal, who simply covers his con-
genital want of moral or social sense with a
political varnish ; the insane criminal, or
mattoid, whose defect of mental equilibrium
connects itself with the political ideas of the
moment ; one may also find the criminal from
political passion truly convinced, and all but
normal, with whom the criminal act is solely
determined by the false idea (which socialism
fights against) of the possibility of a social
transformation by individual violence.0

* Hamon, Les Hommes et les theories de I'anarchie.

K

I30

However that may be, whether it is a ques-
tion of a born or an insane criminal, or of a
political criminal from passion, it is not less
true that the personal violence adopted by
individualistic anarchists is only the logical
product of individualism pushed to extremes,
and, therefore, the natural product of the pre-
sent economic organisation, supported by the
" frenzy of hunger," acute or chronic ; but
it is also the most efficacious and the most
anti -humane means of social transformation. f

But all anarchists are not individualists,
" amorphists," or autonomists ; there are also
communist anarchists.

The latter repudiate personal violence as an
ordinary means of social transformation (Mer-
lino, for instance, has recently affirmed this in
his pamphlet : Necessitd e base df un accordo,
Prato, 1892) but even these communist
anarchists separate themselves from Marxian
socialism both by their ultimate ideal, and
especially by their method of social trans-
formation. They oppose Marxian socialism
because it is according to law and parlia-
mentary, and they maintain that the most
efficacious and surest mode of social trans-
formation is revolt.

Paris, 1893. Lombroso, Ultime scoperte ed applicazioni
dell' antropologia criminale, Turin, 1893.

t At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of
the Italian edition of this book, the excitement had not
yet disappeared which the indefensible outrage directed
against M. Crispi, at Rome, on June i6th, had caused,
and especially the much more vivid excitement caused by
the death of the President of the French Republic, Sadi
Carnot, on June 24th.

I reproduce here, as a document, the declaration

These affirmations, which answer to the
wave of the sentiments and ideas of too large
a part of the working class and to the impa-
tience provoked by their miserable condition,
may meet with an ignorant momentary appro-
bation, but their action can only be ephemeral.
The explosion of a bomb may cause a
momentary excitement, but it cannot advance
by the fraction of an inch the evolution of
intelligence towards socialism, whilst it causes
a sentimental reaction, a reaction partly
sincere but cleverly fomented and exploited
as a pretext for repression.

To say to workmen without having pre-
pared the material means, and especially
without solidarity and moral consciousness,
that they ought to rise against the classes
in power, is rather to play the game of
these very classes, because these are always

published by a section of the Socialist party of Italian
workmen in the Secolo, of June zyth-aSth, and distri-
buted at Milan, as a manifesto, in thousands of copies,
and to which neither Conservative nor Progressive news-
papers have referred, lest the confusion between socialism
and anarchy may be ended.

Here is the declaration : —

"The Socialist Party to Italian Workmen. Down with
assassins ! Humanity understands now that life is sacred,
and does not tolerate brutal violations of this great princi-
ple, which is morally the soul of socialism. — C.Prampolini.

"He who struggles for the right to live in exchange
for his labour, reprobates every attempt on human life —
whether it be the action of bourgeois exploitation in
factories, bombs or daggers of ignorant revolutionaries.

"The Socialist Party, which has this principle for its
motto, which expects everything from the strength of the
class conscious organisation of the workers, execrates
the crime consummated on the person of the President of
the French Republic as a brutal act, as the negation of
every principle of revolutionary logic.

"We must cause the knowledge of its proper rights to

I32

sure of material victory when evolution is not
ripe and revolution is not ready.

Thus we have been able to state in the last
Sicilian revolt, in spite of all interested
untruths, that wherever socialism was most
advanced and reasoned, there were neither
acts of personal violence nor revolt — as for
example, among the peasants of Piana dei
Greci, of whom Nicola Barbato made intelli-
gent socialists, whilst those convulsive move-
ments took place outside the field of the
socialist propaganda, as a revolt against the
municipal exactions and camorre, or where
the less intelligent socialist propaganda had
been stifled by the frenzies caused by hunger
and misery.

History shows that the countries where
revolts have been most frequent are those
where social progress is least advanced.
Popular energies are exhausted and shattered
in these feverish and convulsive excesses, and

penetrate into the .proletariat ; we must furnish it with the
structure of organisation, and impel it to work as if it
were a new organism ; we must conquer public powers
by the means given us by modern civilisation.

"To revolt, to strike haphazard with a bomb at spec-
tators in a theatre, to kill an individual, is the deed of
barbarians or of ignorant people. The socialist party
sees in these acts the violent manifestations of bourgeois
sentiments.

"We are the enemies of all the acts of violence of
bourgeois exploitation, of the guillotine, of a volley of
musketry, of anarchist outrages. Long live socialism.11

Socialism represses all these sterile and repugnant
forms of individual violence.

Carnot dead — after the first excitement which^in retali-
ation was turned against innocent Italians in consequence
of the reawakening of atavic instincts provoked by these
outrages — the French republic elected another president,
and nothing will be changed, as nothing was changed in
Russia after the death of Alexander II. But the question

'33

alternate with periods of despondency and
distrust — with which the Buddhist theory of
electoral abstention, so convenient for conser-
vative parties, corresponds. We never see
there that continuity of conscious action,
slower and less efficacious in appearance, but
really the only kind of action that can bring
to pass what appear to us to be the miracles
of history.

So, Marxian socialism has proclaimed
henceforth in all countries that the principal
means of social transformation must be the
conquest of public powers (in local admini-
strations as well as in parliaments) as one of
the results of the organisation of workmen in
a class conscious party. The further the
political organisation of the workers progresses
in civilised countries, the more through an
inevitable evolution shall the socialist organ-
isation of society be seen to realise itself —

can be looked at from another point of view, which con-
servatives, liberals, and radicals forget too completely.

The same day as 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 210.

However much the death of an honest man like Carnot
may be deplored, it is not comparable with the sum of
human suffering, of the misery and evils with which these
467 workers' families were afflicted, all equally innocent.
And yet class interest — even unconsciously — filled with
regrets, protestations, and demonstrations, the bourgeois
newspapers (conservative, progressive, radical) of the
whole world — and the telegrams, full of dignity, of the
King of Italy were mingled with the oratory sent by my
friend Cavalotti ; but this same class interest — uncon-
sciously if you will — is most completely forgetful of the
martyrs to wock in the mines of Karwinn and Cardiff.

It will be said, and said truly, that the murder of
Carnot was the wilful work of a fanatic, whilst no one

134

first by concessions partial but continually
more important wrung from the capitalist
class by the working class (the law of the
eight hours' day, for example), then, by
the complete transformation of individual
property into social property.

As to the question of knowing if this com-
plete transformation — which is now being
prepared by a slow evolution, and is thus
approaching the critical and decisive moment
of social revolution— will be able to take
place with or without the help of the other
means of transformation — revolt and indi-
vidual violence — there is no one who can
prophesy.

Our sincere wish is that the social revolu-
tion, when its evolution is ripe, will be effected
peacefully, as so many other revolutions have
been carried out without bloodshed : like the
English Revolution which preceded by a

is the author of the death of these 467 miners. And
certainly there is a difference.

But it mwst be noticed that if the death of these 467
miners is not directly the wilful work of anyone, it is
indirectly a consequence of individual capitalism which,
in order to augment its revenue, reduces expenses as
much as possible, does not diminish the hours of work,
does not take all the preventive measures indicated by
science and imposed even sometimes by law, which is not
thus respected — the justice of each country being as flexible
in relation to the interests of the governing class as it is
inflexible in relation to those of the working classes.

If the mines were held as collective property, it is
certain that the holders would be less stingy in taking
all technical preventive precautions (electric lighting for
instance) which would diminish the frightful catastrophes
that augment endlessly the anonymous crowd of martyrs
to work, and do not even trouble the digestion of the
shareholders of mining companies.

That is what the individualist regime gives us; all
that will be changed by the socialist regime.

135

century with the Bill of Rights the French
Revolution ; like the Italian Revolution
accomplished in Tuscany in 1859 ; like the
Brazilian Revolution with the exile of the
Emperor, Dom Pedro, in 1892.

It is certain that culture spread further
among the people and their conscious organi-
sation into a class party under the banner of
socialism, only augment the probability of
our wish, and dissipate the old conjectures of
a reaction after the advent of socialism, for
which there was good reason when socialism
was still Utopian in its means of realisation
instead of being, as it is now, a natural and
spontaneous, and therefore inevitable and
irrevocable, phase of human evolution.

Whence will this social revolution start ? I
am firmly convinced that, if the Latin nations,
because they are Southern, are more ready for
a revolt, which may suffice when it is a ques-
tion of purely political changes, the nations of
the North, German, and Anglo-Saxon, are
better prepared for the tranquil but inexorable
discipline of the true revolution understood as
a critical phase of a prior organic and partial
evolution — the only efficacious process for a
change really social.

It is in Germany and in England where the
greater development of bourgeois industrial-
ism inevitably accelerates its unpleasant
consequences, and consequently accelerates the
necessity of socialism, it is there that the great
social metamorphosis will perhaps begin, the
seeds of which are sown everywhere else, and
from there it will propagate itself across the

I36

old Europe, as at the end of the i8th century
the signal of the political and bourgeois
revolution started from France.

However that may be, we have shown once
more the great difference there is between
socialism and anarchy, which our opponents
and the servile press endeavour to confuse/*
and in every case I have shown that Marxian
socialism is in accord with positive" science,
and continues it. That is just the reason why
it has made the theory of evolution the basis
of its inductions, and that it thus stamps the
really living and definitive phase — con-
sequently the only one in the intelligence of
collective democracy — of this socialism which
has remained till now floating in the clouds
of sentiment, and which the infallible compass
of scientific thought renewed by the works of
Darwin and Spencer, has come to guide.

* I ought to recognise that one of the recent historians
of socialism, M. Pabbe" Winterer — more loyal than many
a Jesuit in a frock coat — distinguishes always for every
country the socialist movement and the anarchist move-
ment. Winterer, Le Socialisme Contemporain, Paris,
1894, 2nd edition.

PART III.

SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM.

CHAPTER XIII.

STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY.

One of the strangest facts in the history of
scientific thought in the igth century is that
though the profound scientific revolution
caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution
has renewed with fresh youth all parts of
physical, biological and even psychological
sciences, when it reached the domain of
the social sciences it only ruffled super-
ficially the water of the tranquil and orthodox
lake of the social science par excellence — .
political economy.

We had, it is true, on the initiative of
Auguste Comte — whose name has been a
little obscured by those of Darwin and Spencer
but who was certainly one of the grandest and
most vitalising spirits of our epoch — the
creation of a new science, sociology, which
ought to have been, together with the natural
history of human societies, the glorious crown
of the new scientific edifice built by the
experimental method.

I do not deny that sociology in the domain
of pure descriptive anatomy of the social
organism-has introduced grand and fructifying
novelties into contemporary science, even

138

branching out in some special sociologies, of
which criminal sociology , through the work of
the Italian school, has become one of the most
important results.

But when we approach the politico-social
question, the new science of sociology is
detected as if in a sort of hypnotic sleep and
is suspended in a sterile colourless limbo, thus
permitting sociologists to be in practical
economics as in politics, conservatives or
radicals according to their fancy, following
their subjective tendencies.

And whilst Darwinian biology, by the
scientific determination of the relations of the
individual and the species, and evolutionist
sociology itself, in describing in human
society the organs and functions of a real
organism, both treated the individual as a cell
in the animal organism, Herbert Spencer
affirmed aloud his English individualism even
up to the most absolute theoretic anarchy.

A stagnation in the scientific production of
sociology was inevitable after the first original
observations of descriptive social anatomy
and of the natural history of human societies.
Sociology thus represented an arrest of
development in experimental scientific thought
because those who cultivated it, wittingly or
unknown to themselves, drew back from the
logical and radical conclusions which the
modern scientific revolution must bring into
the social domain — the most important if
science wishes to exist for the sake of life
instead of contenting itself with the sterile
formula, science for the sake of science,

139

The secret of this strange phenomenon is
not only in this fact as Malagodi said* that
it is still in the period of scientific analysis
and not yet in that of synthesis, but especially
herein, that the logical consequences of Dar-
winism and scientific evolutionism, applied
to the study of human society, lead inexorably
to socialism, as I have demonstrated in the
preceding pages.

* Malagodi, II Socialismo e la scienza in Critica
sociale, August ist, 1892.

CHAPTER XIV.

MARX COMPLETES THE WORK OF DARWIN AND
SPENCER — CONSERVATIVES AND SOCIALISTS.

It is to Karl Marx that the honour falls of
having given a scientific expression to these
logical applications of scientific experiment
in the domain of social economy. Undoubt-
edly the exposition of these truths is surrounded
in his case with a multitude of technical
details and of formulae apparently dogmatic ;
but cannot we say as much of the First
Principles of Spencer, and are not his luminous
passages on evolution surrounded by a mist of
abstractions on time, space, the unknowable,
etc. ? Up to the last few years a conspiracy
of silence has been formed round the masterly
work of Marx ; but now his name stands with
those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer
to complete this scientific revolution which
stirs in the thrilling of a new intellectual
spring the civilising thought of the second
half of the igth century.

The ideas by which the genius of Karl
Marx completed, in the domain of social
economy, the revolution wrought by science
are three in number.

One is the discovery of the law of surplus
value. It gives us a positive explanation of
the accumulation of private property without
labour ; this law having a more particularly
technical character we will not insist upon it

here, having given a general idea of it in the
preceding pages.

The two other Marxian theories have more
relation to our observations on scientific
socialism because they really give us the sure
and infallible key of social life.

I allude to the idea expressed by Marx from
1859 in his Criticism on Political Economy, that
the economic phenomenon is the basis and
condition of all other human or social mani-
festations, and that consequently morals, law,
politics, are only phenomena derived from the
economic factor according to the conditions
of every people in every phase of history and
in all climates.

This idea, which corresponds with the great
biological law that rules that the function is
determined by the organ, and which gives out
that each individual is the resultant of the
conditions innate and acquired of its physio-
logical organism living in a given environ-
ment so that one can give a biological import
to the famous dictum : " Tell me what you
eat and I will tell you* what you are," — this
idea of a genius which displays before our
eyes the grand drama of history, no longer as
the arbitrary succession of great men on the
boards of the social theatre, but rather as
the resultant of the economic conditions of
each people, this grand idea, after a partial
application by Thorold Rogers,* has been so
brilliantly illustrated by Achille Loriaf that
I think it useless to add anything to it.

* Th. Rogers, The Economic Interpretation of History.
t Loria, The Economic Basis of Society, London, 1894.

One idea, however, appears to me still
necessary to complete this Marxian theory as
I had indicated in the first edition of my book
Criminal Sociology.

We must in fact free this impregnable theory
from a species of exclusive dogmatism, which
it has assumed in Marx and still more in
M. Loria.

It is very true that every phenomenon,
like every institution — moral, juridical, or
political — is only the reverberation of the
phenomenon and of the economic conditions
at each moment of the physical and historical
environment. But in consequence of the law
of natural causation, which ensures that every
effect is always the resultant of numerous
intermingled causes and not of one single
cause, and that every effect becomes in its turn
a cause of other phenomena, it is necessary to
fill out this too rigid form of a true idea.

Just as all the psychical manifestations of
the individual are the resultant of organic
conditions (temperament) and of the environ-
ment in which he lives, so all the social
manifestations — moral, juridical, political — of
a people are the resultant of its organic con-
To the general idea of Karl Marx, M. Loria adds a
theory on "the occupation of free land," which is the
fundamental cause and the technical explanation of the
different economic social organisations, a theory which
he has amply proved in his Analisi delta Proprietd
Capitalistica, Turin, 1892. Strange to say, in this last
work M. Loria gives in the first volume the laws of social
economy according to his theory, and in the second
volume he enumerates the facts which support them—
thus following a method diametrically opposed to that of
experimental science, which first makes the statement
of the facts and deduces from them the laws.

H3

ditions (race) and of the environment in so far
as they determine a given economic organisa-
tion which is the physical basis of life.

In their turn the psychical, individual
conditions have an influence, although with
less power, becoming a cause in their turn of
the organic conditions and of the issue of the
struggle for life. In the same way moral,
juridical, political institutions, from effects
become causes (there is not in fact in positive
science any substantial difference between
cause and effect except that the effect is the
constant consequent of a given phenomenon
and that the cause is its constant antecedent)
and react in their turn, although with less
efficacy, on economic conditions.

An individual who has made a study of
hygiene can influence, for instance, the imper-
fections of his digestive apparatus but always
within the very restricted limits of his organic
potentiality. A scientific discovery, an elec-
toral law, can influence industry or the con-
ditions of work, but always within the limits
of the fundamental economic organisation.
This is the reason that moral, juridical, and
political institutions have a greater influence
on the relations between the different cate-
gories of the class that withholds the economic
power (capitalists, manufacturers, landed
proprietors) than on the relations between
the capitalist proprietors on the one side and
the workers on the other.

It is sufficient for me here to recall this
Marxian law and to send to M. Loria's sugges-
tive book the reader who wishes to see how

144

this law explains in a positive manner all the
phenomena, the least as well as the greatest
of social life. This law is truly the most
positive, the most fruitful, the most brilliant
sociological theory, that has ever been dis-
covered. It gives, as I have already indicated,
a positive, physiological, experimental ex-
planation of social history in its grandest
actions and of the most insignificant episodes
of personal history, in complete accord with
the whole trend, which has been called
materialist, of modern scientific thought.

There have been given in the history of
mankind, leaving apart the two anti -scientific
explanations of free will and Divine Provi-
dence, two explanations, one-sided, and in
consequence incomplete, although positive
and scientific. I mean the physical determinism
of Montesquieu, Buckle, and Metschnikoff, and
the anthropological determinism of ethnologists
who see in the organic and psychical charac-
teristics of races the historic reason for events.

Karl Marx resumes and completes these
two theories by his economic determinism.

The economic conditions — which are the
resultant of the energies and ethnological apti-
tudes acting in a given physical environment
— are the determinative basis of all moral,
juridical, and political manifestations of
human, individual, and social life.

This is the theory which we owe to the
genius of Marx, positive and scientific, if any
ever was, which dreads no objection, founded
as it is on the most exact researches of geology
as of biology, of psychology as of sociology.

145

It is, thanks to this theory, that philosophers
in law and sociologists, can determine the
true nature and the functions of the State
which, not being anything else than "society
juridically and politically organised," is only
the secular arm of which the class holding the
economic power — and consequently the
political, judicial, and administrative power
— makes use to preserve as long as possible
its own privileges.

The other sociological theory by which
Karl Marx has really dissipated the clouds
which obscured till now the heaven of
socialist aspirations, and which has furnished
to scientific socialism the political compass
for steering itself with complete assurance in
the contentions of the life of every day, is the
great historic law of the class struggle*

Granted that the economic conditions of
social groups as well as those of individuals
are the fundamental determinant of all moral,
juridical, and political manifestations, it is
evident that each social group, each individual
will be led to act according to his economic
benefit, because that is the physical basis of
life and the condition of all other develop-
ments. In the political order each social class
will be driven to make laws, to establish
institutions, to consecrate customs and beliefs

* As a proof of this conspiracy of silence on the
theories of Karl Marx, it is sufficient for me to recall
that the historians of socialism only speak in general of
the technical theory of surplus value and leave on one
side the two other laws : the determination of social
phenomena and institutions by economic conditions and
the struggle of the classes.

i46

which respond to its benefit directly or
indirectly.

These laws, these institutions, these beliefs
transmitted by heredity or tradition finish by
concealing their economic origin, and philo-
sophers, jurists, and even the unlearned, defend
them as having their worth in themselves,
without seeing their real source ; but the latter
is none the less the only positive explanation
of these laws, these institutions, and these
beliefs. And therein is the strength of the
view of the genius of Marx.*

As in the modern world, there are no more
than two classes with accessory varieties, on
the one side the workers, to whatever category
they may belong, and on the other the owners
of property who do not work, the socialist
theory of Marx leads us to this evident con-
clusion : since political parties are only the
echo and the speaking trumpet of class
interests, whatever varieties there may be,
political parties can only be substantially two
in number — the socialist workers' party and

* The Italian Chamber of Deputies has recently given
us a striking example. Qune, 1894.) Of the different
financial measures proposed by the government to remedy
the financial deficit, the Chamber approved : the increase
on the tax on salt ; the increase of twenty francs per ton
in the tax on corn ; but the increase of twopence in the
land tax was rejected. [Similar examples might be
quoted from the fiscal measures which our own govern-
ment adopted to find money for the South African War. —
ED.] Here the direct influence of class interests is
evident. The contributions of the poor are augmented in
attacking salt and corn, the great landed proprietors are
given a gratuitous bounty by the increase of the duty on
corn, and a small increase of the land tax is refused.

This is the triumph of the agrarians, who are recruited
from the Right as from the Left, over capital invested

H7

the individualist party of the class that
monopolises the land and the other means of
production.

The difference of economic monopoly may,
it is true, determine a certain diversity of
political colour, and I have always maintained
that the great land proprietors represent the
conservative tendencies of political immobil-
ism, whilst the capitalist holders of personal
property, or manufacturers, often represent
the progressive party, carried by its very
nature to little innovations of form ; whilst,
finally, those who only possess intellectual
capital — the liberal and other professions —
can go as far as political radicalism.

On the vital question — that is to say, on
the economic question of property — conserva-
tives, progressives, and radicals are all indi-
vidualists. On this point they are all flesh
and marrow of the same social class, and in
spite of certain sentimental sympathies are
the opponents of the working class and of

in personal property which is struck by the increase of a
20 per cent, deduction.

This increase was voted by the agrarians and fought
against by the progressive party, and rejected even by the
extreme Left. The latter voted against it for a political
reason — so as not to vote for a government proposition —
but really consciously or unconsciously for an economic
reason. It was a struggle between landlords and
capitalists on a question of the distribution of riches.

It would seem as if the socialist deputies ought to have
voted for the increase of the tax on income, but know-
ing that this question does not interest the working class
on whom the taxes ultimately fall, in consequence of the
laws of the incidence of taxation, they took no part in
the vote.

That is a* striking example of the direct or indirect
effect, conscious or unconscious, of the unerring buoy-
ancy of the struggle of the classes.

i48

those who, although born on the other shore,
have embraced its political programme, which
necessarily corresponds with the primordial
economic necessity — that is to say, the sociali-
sation of the land and of the means of pro-
duction, with all the innumerable and radical
transformations, moral, juridical, and political,
which it will necessarily determine in the
social world. That is why contemporary
political life can only degenerate into the
most sterile decadence and into the most
sordid corruption when it confines itself to the
superficial battles of the individualist parties
who only differ in colour and formal etiquette,
but whose ideas are often so analogous that
we frequently see radicals and progressives
less up to date than many conservatives.

Political life will have no fresh birth except
through the development of the socialist
party, because when the historical figures of
the patriots and the personal reasons for differ-
ence between the representatives of the various
political shades have disappeared from the
political arena, the formation of a single
individualist party will become necessary, as
I declared at the sitting of the Italian
Chamber on the 2oth December, 1893.

The historic duel will then be fought and
the class struggle will then unfold on the
political arena all its beneficent influence, not
in the paltry sense of pugilism and outrages,
malice and personal violence, but in the grand
meaning of the social drama. With all my
soul I desire that this conflict may be solved
for the sake of the progress of civilisation

H9

without bloody convulsions, but historical
fatality has initiated it, and it is given neither
to us nor to others to avoid or retard it.

As a result of all we have just said these
ideas of political socialism, because they are
scientific, dispose to personal tolerance at the
same time as to theoretical disagreement. That
is also a conclusion of scientific psychology
in the philosophical domain. Whatever may
be our personal sympathies for such or such
representative of the radical fraction of the
individualist party (as also for every honest
and sincere representative of no matter what
scientific, religious, or political opinion) we
ought to recognise that there is not by the
side of socialism any party organically con-
nected with it. We must be on one side or the
other — individualist or socialist. There is no
intermediate situation, and I am more and
more persuaded that the only useful tactic-
for the formation of a socialist party that will
live, is precisely this theoretical independence
and the refusal of every "alliance" with the
partiti affini who only constitute for socialism
a "false placenta" for a foetus unlikely to live.

The conservative and the socialist are
natural products of individual character and
of social environment. One is born a con-
servative or an innovator, as one is born a
painter or surgeon. So socialists have no
scorn nor any malice against the sincere
representatives of no matter what fraction of
the conservative party whilst fighting to the
death their ideas. If such or such socialist
shows himself intolerant, if he is insulting, it

is because he is the victim of a passing
emotion or of an ill-balanced temperament.
He can consequently be easily excused.

What provokes a smile of pity is to see
certain conservatives, "young in years but
old in thought " — for conservatism with the
young can only be the effect of egoistic
calculation or the sign of physical anaemia —
to see them wear an air of self -sufficiency or
of pity for socialists, whom they consider at
the best as " led astray," without perceiving
that what is normal is for old people to be
conservatives, but that young conservatives
can only be egoists who fear to lose the lazy
ease in which they were born or the
advantages of the established method of
"raking in the spoils." If their brains
are not poor, at least their hearts are. The
socialist, who has everything to lose and
nothing to gain in loudly affirming his point
of view, can oppose all the superiority of a
disinterested altruism, especially when, born
in the aristocratic or bourgeois class, he has
renounced the brilliant pleasures of a lazy
life to defend the cause of the feeble and the
oppressed.

But, they say, these bourgeois socialists act
in this way for. the love of popularity. A
strange egoism in every case which prefers
to the bourgeois individualism of honours and
rapid gains, "the socialist idealism" of popu-
lar sympathy, even when this sympathy could
be gained by other means which would com-
promise a man less with the class in power !

Let us hope, finally, that when the

bourgeoisie must abandon economic and
political power in order that both may be
exercised for the advantage of all in the new
society, and that when, as Berennini recently
said, conquerors and conquered become really
brothers without distinction of class in the
common security of a life worthy of a human
being, let us hope that in abandoning power
the bourgeoisie may do so with the dignity
and respectability that the aristocracy showed
when it was despoiled as a class by the
triumphant bourgeoisie at the moment of the
French Revolution.

It is the truth brought by socialism, and its
complete accord with the most certain induc-
tions of positive science, which explains to us
not only its immense progress which might
be only the purely negative effect of a material
and moral uneasiness become acute in a period
of social crisis, but which especially explains-
this unity of disciplineand conscious solidarity
which offers by the world-wide demonstrations
of the first of May, a moral phenomenon of a
grandeur of which human history gives no
other example — if we except the movement of
primitive Christianity, which had moreover a
much more restricted field of action than
contemporary socialism.

Beyondsome hysterical or ignorant efforts for
a return of bourgeois scepticism to mysticism,
as a safeguard against the moral and material
crisis of the present time (which recalls to us
the wanton woman who became sanctimo-
nious irf her old age)* the partisans and

* We can, however, mention certain very sympathetic

opponents of socialism will be forced hence-
forth to recognise that, like Christianity at
the dissolution of the Roman world, socialism
forms the only power which restores the hope
of a better future for our old human society,
and this in the name of a faith no longer
inspired by the ignorant aspirations of senti-
ment, but the result of rational confidence in
positive science.

manifestations of this mysticism which I shall call social
mysticism. We can cite the works of Tolstoi, who
envelopes his socialism in the doctrine of "non-resistance
to evil by violence " drawn from the Sermon on the
Mount.

Tolstoi is thus an eloquent anti-militarist, and I am
pleased to see quoted in his book Salvation is within
you, a passage from one of my lectures against war.

But he keeps outside contemporary positive science and
his work loses thus in its import.

153
APPENDIX I.

A LETTER TO AN ITALIAN JOURNAL IN REPLY TO A
LETTER BY MR. HERBERT SPENCER WHICH

IT HAD PUBLISHED.
SIR,

I have read in your journal a letter of Mr. H. Spencer,
who, on some indirect information which has been sent
him on my book, "Socialism and Positive Science," is
"astonished at the audacity with which use has been
made of his name in defending socialism."

Permit me to assure you that no socialist has ever
dreamed of making Mr. Spencer, who is certainly the
greatest of living philosophers, pass as a partisan of
socialism. And it is very strange that anyone should have
been able to make him believe that there exists in Italy
enough ignorance among writers, as well as among
readers, to misuse in such a grotesque fashion the name
of Herbert Spencer, whom all the world knows to be an
extreme individualist.

But the personal opinion of H. Spencer is a different
matter from the logical consequence of the scientific
theories on unive'rsal evolution which he has developed
farther and better than any other man, but of which he
has not the official monopoly nor the power to prohibit
their free expansion by the labour of other thinkers.

As for myself, in the preface to my book, I observed
that Spencer and Darwin had stopped half-way in the
logical consequences of their doctrines. But I have shown
that these doctrines themselves constituted the scientific
foundation of the socialism of Marx, the only man who,
whilst raising himself above the preceding sentimental
socialism, has scientifically disciplined and systematised
the statements of social facts, political conclusions, and
the changing method of tactics, whilst remaining revo-
lutionary in his aim.

As for Darwinism, not being able to repeat here the
arguments which are already contained in my book, and
which will be developed in the second edition, it is
sufficient for me to recall — as it is thought fit to have
recourse to arguments so little conclusive as an appeal to
personal authority — that, among many others, the cele-
brated Virchow foresaw with great acuteness that
Darwinism led directly to socialism, and that the cele-
brated Wallace, a Darwinian, if there is one, is a
member of the English Land Nationalisation Society,
which stands for one of the fundamental conclusions of
socialism.

And on the other side, what is the famous " class
struggle," which Marx revealed as the positive key of
human history, if not the Darwinian law of the "struggle

for life," transferred from individuals to aggregates of
individuals?

Besides, every individual, every class or social group,
struggles for its existence. And just as the bourgeoisie
has struggled against the clergy and the aristocracy and
has triumphed in the French Revolution, so to-day the
international proletariat struggles, not by violence, as we
are always being accused of doing, but by propaganda
and association, for its economic and moral existence,
which at present is ill secured and so grievously oppressed.

As for the theory of evolution, how can one not notice
that it gives the most striking contradiction to the classi-
cal theories of a political economy which sees in the
bases of the present economic organisation eternal and
immutable laws?

Socialism, on the contrary, maintains that economic
institutions, juridical and political institutions, are only
the historical product of an epoch, and that, consequently,
they are variable, since they are in continuous evolution
through which the present differs from the past just as
the future will be different from the present.

Herbert Spencer believes that universal evolution rules
all orders of phenomena with the exception of the organi-
sation of property, which he declares is destined to exist
eternally in its individualistic form. Socialists, on the
contrary, believe that the organisation of property will
itself also undergo a radical transformation, and, taking
into consideration past transformations, assert that eco-
nomic evolution is represented and will be represented
more and more — after the excesses of individual concen-
tration— in an increasing and complete socialisation of
the means of production, which constitute the physical
basis of social and collective life, and which ought not
to, and, therefore, cannot, remain in the hands of a few
individuals.

Between these two doctrines it is not difficult to decide
which is most in accord with the scientific theory of
physical and social evolution.

At any rate, and with all the respect due to our intel-
lectual father, Herbert Spencer, but also with all the pride
to which my studies and my scientific conscience give
me a right, it is sufficient for me to have repelled the
anathema which Herbert Spencer, without having read my
book, and on information indirect and not very straight-
forward, has thought he could fling in such a dogmatic
tone against a scientific thesis which I have not solely
affirmed with an ipse dixit (which has served its time), but
which I have studied and maintained with arguments
which have till now vainly awaited a scientific contradic-
tion.

ENRICO FERRI.
Rome, June, 1895.

155
APPENDIX II.

NOTE.— This appendix has been pruned of some of the matter which is
either of interest only to those who follow closely ths proceedings of the
Italian School of Positive Criminology or who have read Baron Garofalo's
book. Every part of the appendix which amplifies and enforces the
argument of the book is retained. — ED.

SOCIALIST SUPERSTITION AND INDIVIDUALIST
SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS.

Among the numerous publications which have appeared
in Italy for or against socialism since my Socialismo e
scienza positiva, which showed the agreement of social-
ism with the fundamental lines of contemporary scientific
thought — the book of Baron Garofalo was expected with
lively interest.* It was looked for on account of the well-
known name of the author and of the open and radical
disagreement which, with his book, would be disclosed
among the founders of the positivist criminal school,
formerly so united and bound together in the propaganda
and defence of the new science — anthropology and
criminal sociology — created by M. Lombroso.

It is true that the scientific union of the founders of
the new Italian criminalist school formed an agreement,
but they were never in unison.

M. Lombroso carried into the study of crime as a
natural and social phenomenon the original impulse and
the striking and fruitful assistance of anthropological
and biological studies. I brought the theoretical system-
atisation of the problem of human responsibility, and my
psychological and sociological researches have permitted
me to classify the natural causes of crime and the anthro-
pological categories of criminals. I have shown the
preponderating r61e of social prevention — very different
from police prevention — of criminality, and have proved
the infinitesimal influence of 'repression, which is always
violent and posthumous. t

M. Garofalo — being quite in agreement with us in the
diagnosis of criminal pathology — brought, however, a
current of his own ideas, almost spiritualistic and less
heterodox, such as, for example, the idea that the anomaly
of the criminal is only a "moral anomaly" ; that religion
has a preventive influence on criminality ; that severe re-
pression is in all cases the efficacious remedy for it ; that
misery not only is not the single and exclusive cause of
crime (which I have always sustained and which I still
sustain), but that it has no determinative influence on the

* La Superstition socialiste. French translation by M. Dietrich. Bibliotheque
de philosophie contetnjoraine, Paris, Alcan, 1895.

t E. Ferri, Socinlogia Criminal?, 1880, translated into French by the author
from the third Italian edition, Paris, Rousseau, editor 1893. The most impor-
tant part of this work has been translated and published in the Criminology
Series, edited by Dr. Douglas Morrison.

1 56

offence ; that popular instruction, instead of being a
preventive means, is, on the contrary, a goad, etc.

These ideas in evident disagreement with the inductions
of criminal biology, psychology and sociology, as I have
proved elsewhere, did not, however, hinder the agreement
of the positivists of the new school. In fact these per-
sonal and old-fashioned conceptions of M. Garofalo passed
almost unperceived. His action was specially marked by
the importance and greater development which he gave to
the purely juridical inductions of the new school which
he systematised in a plan of penal reforms and reforms of
procedure possible even to-day, to eliminate the most
acute absurdities which the positivist doctrine and his
experience as a magistrate, although a little one-sided,
had caused him to notice in penal justice. He was the
jurist of the new school, M. Lombroso was its anthro-
pologist, and I its sociologist.

But whilst with M. Lombroso and myself the progres-
sive and heterodox tendency was more and more accen-
tuated, even to socialism, one could already foresee that
with M. Garofalo the orthodox and reactionary tendencies
would become more vivid until he had abandoned the
common ground on which we had fought together and
on which we might still fight.

After the recital of this personal episode we must now
examine the contents of this "Socialist superstition" to
see in the schism of positive criminologists which of them
follows best the discipline of experimental science and
traces most rigorously the trajectory of human evolution.

We must see which of the two is more scientific, he
who, carrying the experimental method beyond the re-
searches limited by criminal anthropology into the field
of the whole of social science, accepts all the logical con-
sequences of scientific observations and gives his open
adherence to Marxian socialism ; or he who, a positivist
and an innovator in a special branch of the science,
remains a conservative in other branches to which he
refuses to apply the positive method and which he no
longer studies with a critical spirit, being content with
the easy and superficial repetition of the data of common
place and routine.

The perusal of this book gives immediate evidence from
the first to the last page of a marked contrast between
M. Garofalo, the heterodox criminologist, always- ready
for an acute criticism of classic criminology, always a
rebel to the commonplaces used by juridical tradition,
and M. Garofalo the anti-socialist, the orthodox socio-
logist, the man of routine, who finds everything good
in the present world, including the unproductive and
insolent luxury of sportsmen ; who curses the French
Revolution in order to make an idyllic description of

the ancient regime, forgetting, however, the deer park;
and who without adducing any original observation limits
himself to a repetition of the most superficial declama-
tions of M. Guyot, or some other journalist, and that in
a language violent and sometimes puerile. He who was
before distinguished for the tone of his publications,
which were always calm and sedate, makes us now think
that, less convinced of being right than he would have
us believe, he clamours and makes a great noise.

For example, on page 17, in a style which is neither
aristocratic nor bourgeois, he writes that "M. Bebel had
the effrontery to make in the open Reichstag an apology
for the Commune," and he forgets that the Commune of
Paris must not be judged historically only according to
the contradictory impressions left by the artificial and
exaggerated narrations of the bourgeois press of that
time. Malon and Marx have shown from documents
whose statements cannot be disputed, and on unassail-
able historical grounds, what is the impartial judgment
which ought to be passed on the Commune in spite of
the excesses which — as M. Alfred Maury said to me at
Pere-Lachaise one day in 1879 — were far surpassed by
the ferocity of a savage repression.

In the same way on pages 20 and 22, he speaks, I do
not know why, of the "scorn" of the Marxian socialists
for sentimental socialism, which no one has ever thought
of scorning, although we recognise that it is very little
in agreement with the positive discipline of social science.

And on page 154 he thinks he is carrying on a scientific
discussion by writing : "Truly, when we see that 'men
professing such doctrines find a means of making them-
selves heard, we are obliged to recognise that there is no
limit to human imbecility."

Ah ! my dear Baron Garofalo, how this language
reminds me of that of certain classical criminologists —
do you remember it? — who though they could fight the
positivist school with a language too like this, which con-
ceals under the banal phrase the absolute want of ideas
with which to oppose the detested, but victorious heresy.

With regard to my statement that the whole of contem-
porary science is dominated by the idea and the fact of
the social aggregate — and therefore of socialism — against
the glorification which the i8th century made of the
individual, and, therefore, of individualism, M. Garofalo
answers me that "the story of Robinson Crusoe has been
borrowed from a very true history," adding that "one
could cite many cases of anchorites and hermits who had
no need of the company of their fellow-creatures" (p. 82).

He thinks he has thus shown that I was mistaken
when I affirmed that the species is the only eternal reality

158

of life, and that the individual — himself a biological
aggregate — does not live alone and by himself alone, but
only in so far as he makes part of an aggregate to which
he owes all the creative conditions of his material, moral
and intellectual existence.

Verily, if M. Garofalo had made use of these argu-
ments to combat the absurdities of penal metaphysics
and to sustain the heresies of the positivist school, the
latter would not cite him amongst its most eloquent and
suggestive initiators. So that the man being the same,
we must conclude that it is only to the feebleness of the
cause to-day defended by him that he owes the platitude
of such arguments.

And his critical vigour does not increase when, taking
on himself the refrain that the collectivist society will be
like a convent, he says : "Shall we all be workmen? But
what ! We shall all be beggars. Our daily activity will
have no other aim than to procure us a 'ticket' for a
kind of economic kitchen. Let one imagine the intrigues
and frauds with a view to obtaining these tickets, which
from the first day would play the part of money after a
little work or without any work. Let one imagine the
Privileges, the exemptions, the waste, the certificates of
feigned illness, the family tickets, the double tickets, and
all imaginable tickets !" (page 87).

It is true that M. Garofalo's book was written on his
own acknowledgment for the good bourgeoisie and not for
men of science, but it has been translated and published
in a celebrated "Library of Contemporary Philosophy."
Is it possible to believe that a man of talent, such as M.
Garofalo, really thinks that the whole of socialism con-
sists in the "tickets" for a "kind of economic kitchen"?

This manner of arguing is too much like the sermons
of country priests for me to think there is any use in
answering it. I will only say that these discourses of
my friend, Baron Garofalo, recall to me the objections
which criminologists raised against us ten years ago,
when they said that criminal anthropology was only a
measuring of skulls, and that the penal justice of the
future would have as a criterion of responsibility the
length of the criminal's nose !

And yet M. Garofalo, instead of these commonplaces
which are enough to send us to sleep, might have dis-
cussed seriously the fundamental thesis of socialism,
which, by the social ownership of the land and the 'means
of production, tends to assure every individual the con-
ditions of a more humane existence and of a complete
and truly free development of his physical and moral
personality. For only then, the daily food for body and
soul being secure, every man can, as Goethe said,
"become what he is," instead of wearing himself out,
wasted away in the spasmodic and exhausting conquest

159

of daily bread, too often at the expense of personal
dignity or intellectual aptitudes, in an evident squander-
ing of human forces to the great disadvantage of society
as a whole, and with the appearance of individual liberty,
but really with the submission of the large majority to
the class of the possessors of economic monopoly.

But M. Garofalo has abstained altogether from these
discussions, where one can on both sides adduce scientific
arguments. Even when he tried to discuss seriously, he
did not go beyond the repetition of the most superficial
commonplaces.

Thus, for example (page^ga), against the socialists who
maintain that the variations of the social environment
will determine necessarily a change in the individual
aptitudes and activities, he cries : "But the world cannot
change if men do not first begin to change themselves
under the influence of these two ideal factors : honour
and duty."

That is to say, a man must not throw himself into the
water if he has not first learnt to swim whilst keeping
on the land.

Nothing, on the contrary, is more conformable to the
positive inductions of biology and sociology than the
socialist idea, according to which the changes of the
environment determine the correlative changes, physio-
logical and psychical in individuals. Is not the whole
essence of Darwinism in the variability, organic and
functional, of individuals and species under the modify-
ing influence of the environment confirmed and trans-
mitted by natural selection? And neo-Darwinism itself,
is it not wholly devoted to the ever-increasing importance
given to the changes of the environment in order to
explain the variations of living creatures?

And in the sociological order, following the repeated
and not suspected proofs of Spencer, in the passage from
the warlike type to the industrial type of human societies
— which St. Simon had already pointed out — just as this
human nature which anti-socialists put before us as
something immutable and fixed like the created species
of ancient biology, changes in adapting itself to the
change of type, so in the gradual passage to a collectivist
organisation, human nature will adapt itself necessarily
to the modified social conditions.

Certainly human nature will not change in its funda-
mental tendencies. For example, men, like animals, will
always shun pain and seek pleasure, since the former is a
diminution and the latter an increase of life ; but this will
not hinder the fact that the application and direction of
these biological tendencies can and must change with the
changes of the environment. So that I have been able to
show elsewhere that individual egoism will certainly
always exist, but it will act in a profoundly different

i6o

fashion in a society directed towards a true human
solidarity, from the way in which it acts in the indi-
vidualistic and morally anarchical world of to-day, where
every man through so-called free competition is forced to
follow his anti-social egoism — that is to say, to be in
opposition to, and not in agreement with, the necessities
and tendencies of the other members of society.

But the repetition of the most worn-out commonplaces
certainly reaches its summit when, through inattention
on the part of the author, M. Garofalo writes these
marvellous lines : —

"Many young people of aristocratic families apparently
do not work. It is, however, more accurate to say that
they do not perform any productive work for themselves,
but they work just the same ( ! !), and it is for the benefit
of others.

"In fact, these 'lazy' gentlemen are really given up
to sport — the chase, navigation, riding, fencing — or to
travels, or to dilettantism in the arts, and their activity,
unproductive for themselves, furnishes profitable occupa-
tions for an immense number of persons " (page 183).

One day studying the prisoners, one of them said to
me : "People cry out a good deal against criminals
because they do not work ; but if we did not exist, an
immense number of persons — gaolers, policemen, judges,
advocates — would be without profitable occupation."*

After having noted these specimens of scientific inatten-
tion, and before approaching the examination of the rare
arguments scientifically developed by M. Garofalo, it is
useful, in order to be able to pass a general judgment on
his book, to show at what point he has forgotten the
most elementary rules of the positive method.

And it will be useful also to add some examples of
errors of fact bearing either on science in general or on
the doctrines combated by him.

* And in the French translation M. Garofalo still maintains his miraculous
affirmation, even against the objections of M. Nitti, an eclectic and an oppor-
tunist, but a talented economist, who with regard to this declared "that Rastiat
himself had never said anything like it."

Here is the answer of M. Garofalo: "Let us suppose that the great lordly
parks are used by companies of hunting men. Will the grooms and valets be
as well fed and lodged in the service of the company ns they are to-day in that
of the rich lords?" But first one might suppose that "great parks "would be
cultivated with a view to useful production instead of being abandoned to
companies of huntsmen.

And secondly, is not the parasitism of servants, whose number increases
in epochs of decadence, a phenomenon of social pathology when such a number
ofprrsons are devoted to the personal cares "of the grent lord instead of
working at the production of useful objects?" If the reasoning of M.
Garofalo were sound, it would follow that society would have more interest
in hiving more " lordly parks" and vnlets than cultivated fields and agricul-
tural or industrial workers,

On page 41, spooking of tho scientific work of Marx
with a disdain that cannot be taken seriously, because it
too much resembles that of the theologians for Darwin
or that of the jurists for Lombroso, he gives this curious
reasoning : "Starting from the supposition that all private
property is unjust, it is not logic which is wanting in the
doctrine of Marx. But if we recognise, on the contrary,
that every individual has the right to own something,
there results immediately the inevitable consequence of
the fruit of capital, and, therefore, of the augmentation
of it."

Ah ! Monsieur de la Palisse, you who before dying
were alive, how your joyous image comes to my mind
through an invincible association of ideas.

Certainly, if we admitted, a priori, the right of indi-
vidual ownership of the land and of the means of
production, it is useless to set ourselves to discuss it.

But the misfortune is that the whole of the scientific
work of Marx and of the socialists has exactly for its
object to give positive proofs of the true genesis of
capitalist property — surplus value not paid for to the
worker — and to put an end to the old fables of " the
first occupier," of the " accumulated savings," which
are exceptions more and more rare.

Besides, the negation of private property is not " the
supposition," but the logical and inexorable consequence
of premises of fact and historical statements made not only
by 'Marx but by a numerous company of sociologists who,
leaving on one side the mental reticences and reserves of
orthodox conventionalism, have become thereby socialists.

As to the posthumous work of Marx, of which M.
Garofalo speaks in his preface to the French translation,
it is easy to answer the affirmation of M. Loria that the
third volume of the Capital of Marx is the suicide of the
theory of surplus value, and that, consequently, Marx
and socialism are quite dead and buried in their own
rubbish. First of all, the opinion of M. Loria is not
indisputable, even on the technical question of the few
economic facts of which the theory of surplus value would
not give an explanation, for there are other economists
who do not think with M. Loria with regard to the third
volume of Capital. And in the second place, passing
upon one side the fact that M. Loria himself, after all
the tumult led by the Italian bourgeois press about his
judgment upon the posthumous work of Marx, publicly
declared that in spite of all he thinks socialism repre-
sents the scientific truth in political economy, we can
remind our opponents that the work of Marx, the basis
of scientific socialism, is by no means exclusively in the
technical theory of surplus value, but that it is also in
the unshaken sociological theories of " the struggle of
the classes" and of "historic materialism."

1 62

Not less strange for a scientist is the artificial reason-
ing which permits M. Garofalo to maintain in Chapter II.
that socialists have no logic, because if the passage to
collectivism is determined by the progressive accumula-
tion of wealth in a small number of hands, " they ought
then to favour this accumulation." As if the social
evolution were not itself a natural evolution, and, there-
fore superior to the freewill of individuals and parties.

But therein precisely consists the force of the scientific
socialism of Marx and Engels. It has transported into
the field of political economy the idea and the positive
sense of an historic and natural evolution, and confines
itself to stating an order of succession in social forms just
as Darwinian biology only states an order of succession
in organic forms.

But contemporary socialism, just because it is in com-
plete agreement with scientific and positive thought, has
no more of the illusions of those who imagine that to-
morrow— with a dictator " of prodigious intelligence and
remarkable eloquence," charged with organising collec-
tivism by way of decrees and rules— one could leap the
intermediate phases. Besides, has not individualism,
absolute and unbounded, been already transformed into
a limited individualism and a partial collectivism by the
legal limitations of the jus abutendi and by the continued
transformation into social function or public ownership
of services (lighting, drinking water, transport) or pro-
perties (roads, bridges, canals) which formerly were
private services and properties. These intermediate
phases cannot be suppressed by decree, but they develop
and exhaust themselves naturally and daily under the
pressure of economic and social conditions ; but by
natural, and therefore inexorable, process, they always
approach nearer to the ulterior phase of the absolute
collectivism of the means of production, which the
socialists have not invented, but which they only assert
and whose course they foresee positively, which they can
accelerate by giving to the proletarians, formed into a
c'ass party, a clearer consciousness of their historic rdle.

To his psychological errors M. Garofalo has added such
a grave biological error that it allows me to suppose
that in his anti-socialist fury he has been struck with a
passing scientific loss of memory.

On page 231 he writes : "For socialists the inequality
of economic conditions, which does not always permit
the most deserving to be sufficiently esteemed and re-
warded, is the great social injustice that it is necessary

i63

to suppress. For us, on the contrary, this inequality
which is a natural effect of social development and which
cannot be suppressed has, however, its good side, because
it is a means of moral and intellectual progress."

I abandon the taking up of this gratuitous prophecy
that the exaggeration of natural social inequalities caused
by the inequalities could not be at all suppressed ; for I
occupied myself with that in my book, Socialism and
Positive Science.

I only wish to echo here the assertion that social in-
equalities, principally economic, are a "means of moral
and intellectual progress," for it receives the most clear
contradiction from the most positive data of the most
orthodox biology and sociology.

This assertion of M. Garofalo is completed in fact by
this other on page 237, that " hereditary property is
actually the sole guarantee of a good education, the only
force which still subsists in the world for the selection of
individuals, who are not absolutely the strongest from
the physical or intellectual point of view, but who are
fit by their mental structure to appreciate and preserve
the conquests of civilisation.

Now it is sufficient to remember the conclusion to
which such learned men as Lucas, Galton, Morel, Ribot,
Jacoby, etc., have arrived on "natural selection in its
relations to heredity in man," to know on the contrary
that it is a biological fact and historically undeniable
that every monopoly of wealth or power is an inevitable
source of physical and mental degeneracy.

The hereditary transmission of an economic or politi-
cal privilege consumes, in fact, or wastes away in the
descendants every vital energy, and, adding to that the in-
evitable abuse of power possessed gratuitously, condemns
all aristocracies of blood, or gold, or power, to a succes-
sion of physical weakness, psychical degeneracy — even to
extinction through sterility.'

This is without reckoning, on the other side, that the
monopoly of wealth in a few families has, as an in-
separable consequence, misery in many others, and that
in this way again it leads to another series of evils and
degeneracy.

There you have progressive selection and the aptitude
for preserving the conquests of civilisation !

These errors of fact in biological and psychological
science are not the only ones.

In fact, on" page 14, M. Garofalo begins by affirming
that the "true tendency of the party called the Working-

i64

men's Party is to get possession of power, not in the
interest of all, but to expropriate the. governing class and
substitute themselves for it. They make no mystery,
moreover, about it." This assertion is found again tan
page 210, etc.

Now, it is sufficient to have read the programmes of
the socialist party from the Manifesto of Marx and Engels
to the propaganda publications, to know, on the contrary,
that contemporary socialism wishes, and declares that it
wishes, to arrive at the general suppression of every
division of the social classes by putting an end to the
division of the social inheritance of production, and,
therefore, proclaims that it is resolved to realise the well-
being of all, and not only — as a few short-sighted people
continue to believe — the well-being of a fourth estate,
which will only have to continue the egoistical example
of the third estate.

Starting from this fundamental datum of socialism that
every individual, except a child, a sick man, an invalid,
ought to work in order to live, whatever may be the
useful work that he accomplishes, this inevitable conse-
quence follows, that in a society ordered on this prin-
ciple every class antagonism will become impossible, for
this antagonism only exists when the society includes a
large majority who work for a miserable livelihood, and
a small minority who live well without working at all.

This initial error naturally dominates the whole scheme
of the book. It is thus, for example, that Chapter III.
is devoted to proving that the "social revolution prepared
by the new socialists will be the destruction of all moral
order in society because it is lacking in an ideal which
can be a luminous standard for it " (page 159).

Let us leave on one side, my dear Baron, the famous
"moral order" of the society which decorates the gloved
and eminent thieves of great and little Panamas, of
banks and railroads, and which condemns to imprison-
ment the children and women who steal dry wood or
grass from the fields which formerly belonged to the
community !

But to say that socialism is wanting in an ideal, when
even its opponents recognise it to possess the immense
superiority and power of opposing to the earthly scepti-
cism of the present world an ardent faith in a better
social justice for all, and of presenting thereby such a
resemblance to primitive and regenerating Christianity
(very different from its fatty degeneracy called Catholi-
cism)— to say this is for a scientist to put himself into
blind rebellion against the most evident reality of daily
fact.

But the fundamental equivocation from which so many
thinkers — M. Garofalo included among them — cannot free

themselves, and to which I yielded myself before pene-
trating, thanks to the Marxian theory of historical
materialism — or more exactly economic determinism —
into the true spirit of socialist sociology, is that people
judge the inductions of socialism upon biological, psy-
chological and sociological data of present society without
thinking of the necessary changes which will be brought
about by a different economic, and, therefore, moral and
political, environment.

In M. Garofalo's book is found this begging the
question which refuses to believe in the future in the
name of the present which is declared to be immutable —
just as if in the first geological epochs it was concluded
that from the flora and fauna of that time it was impos-
sible to have a flora and fauna as different as are
cryptogams from conifers and molluscs from mammals.

This confirms once more the observation I made
above, that to deny socialism is to deny implicitly this
law of universal and eternal evolution, which, however,
determines the tendency of contemporary scientific
thought.

On page 16, M. Garofalo prophesies that with the
triumph of socialism "we shall see reappear the reign of
physical force, irrational and brutal, and that we should
assist, as happens every day in the lowest depths of the
populace, at the triumph of the most violent men. And
he repeats it (pages 208-210) ; but he forgets that in the
socialist premiss of a better ordered social environment
this brutality, which is the product of the present misery
and want of education, would necessarily gradually
diminish, and finally disappear.

Now, the possibility of this amelioration of the social
environment which socialism affirms, is a thesis which
we can discuss ; but that a writer, in order to deny this
possibility, should urge against the future the effects of a
present which it is wished to eliminate, this is where the
insidious equivocation conceals itself, the discovery of
which is sufficient to remove any foundation from the
different reasonings that may be derived from it.

To the socialistic arguing of M. Jules Guesde, that "in
a nation that was mistress of its means of production,
every worker would endeavour to obtain the maximum
product in the minimum of time possible, because the
augmentation of production and the reduction of the time
of work would be translated into increased enjoyments
for all workers," M. Garofalo replies, on page 49, that
" the fruit of the work having to be divided equally
among all the workers of a nation, let us suppose twenty
millions, the-increase of production due to the greater
activity of one workman would only form an infinitesi-
mal quantity of the sum total of which the good work-
man would only have for his share the 2o-millionth part.

i66

Now, here is again the same equivocation. M.
Garofalo supposes that the increase of activity and of
production is only realised with a single worker, and
that this increase alone has to be distributed among the
whole of the workers, forgetting to think —

(I.) That in the hypothesis it is not one single worker,
but all the workers of the nation that will augment their
activity, and thus increase the production.

(II.) That in the state of present servitude the work-
man works without spirits, without hope, and, therefore,
without feeling bound to him who rewards him so badly
for his work ; the contrary will happen when all the
citizens are only co-operators, all equally interested in
the administration of the social inheritance.

And it is still, thanks to the same equivocation, that he
can affirm, on page 213, that in a socialist re'gime "the
fine arts will not be able to exist. It is very well to say
that they would henceforth be for the profit of the public.
Of what public? Of the great mass of people deprived
of artistic education?" As if when misery is once
eliminated, and work becomes less exhausting for the
working classes, the ease and economic security which
would result from it would not develop among them
also aesthetic pleasure, twhich they feel and gratify now as
it is possible to them in the manifestations of popular
art, or, indeed, as is seen to-day in Paris and Vienna in
the "Socialist Theatre," and at Brussels in the free
musical matinees, instituted by socialists, and frequented
by an always increasing number of workers. It is the
same with scientific instruction, as is proved by the
" university extension movement " in England and
Belgium. And all that in spite of the present absence of
artistic education, but thanks to the existence among the
workers of these countries of an economic condition less
miserable than that of the agricultural or even industrial
proletariat in countries like Italy.

In my book, Socialismo et Criminalita, published in
1883, and which my opponents, including M. Garofalo
(p. 128 and following), now try to compare with the
opinions which I have maintained in my more recent
book, Socialisme et science positive, 1 developed two
arguments :

(1) That the social arrangement could not have been
changed suddenly, as sentimental socialism then main-
tained in Italy, because the law of evolution is a
sovereign ruler in the human world as in the organic and
inorganic world.

(2) That, from analogy, crime could not disappear
absolutely from humanity, as the Italian sentimentalists
of that time vaguely insinuated.

16;

Now, first of all, there would be nothing contradictory
if, after having partially accepted socialism, which I did
already in 1883, the progressive evolution of my mind,
after having studied the scientific systematizing of Marx
and his collaborators, had led me to recognise (without
any personal advantage) the whole truth of socialism.
But, above all, precisely because scientific socialism
(since Marx, Engels, Melon, de Paepe, Dramard,
Lanessan, Guesde, Shaeffle, George, Bebel, Loria,
Colajanni, Turati, De Greef, Lafargue, Jaures, Renard,
Denis, Pleckanov, Vandervelde, Letourneau, L. Jacoby,
Labriola, Kautsky, etc.) is different from sentimental
socialism which I alone had in view in 1883, it is for this
very reason that I still maintain to-day these two prin-
cipal arguments, and I thus find myself in complete
agreement with international scientific socialism.

Marxism, in fact, recognises that it is only by evolu-
tion— gradual, but day by day more accelerated and
fuller — that the substitution of the socialist regime for
the individualist rdgime can be realised ; because the
social revolution, in the sense which I shall presently
name, will only be possible after the moral revolution
has been realised among the proletarians of the civilised
world, from the natural result of their actual and
common economic conditions.

And as for the absolute disappearance of all crimin-
ality I maintain still my argument of 1883. In Socialisme
et science positive (§ 3) I have written that in a socialist
regime there will be — although in infinitely less proper-'
tions — some conquered in the struggle for existence, and
that if the chronic and epidemic forms of nervous affec-
tion, of crime, of madness, of suicide, are destined to
disappear, the acute and sporadic forms will not com-
pletely disappear.

It is then natural that in a socialist regime, with the
disappearance of misery, the principal source of popular
degeneracy is exhausted in epidemic and chronic forms
of illness, crimeSj madness, suicide ; that is indeed what
one sees now — in less proportions but with a positive
confirmation of the general induction — since illnesses,
crimes, madness, suicide increase during times of scarcity
and crises, whilst they lessen in the years of less miser-
able economic conditions.

That is not saying enough ; even in the bourgeoisie
and aristocracy, who only see every day that the feverish
competition and the spasmodic struggle for the conquest
and preservation of their inheritance condemn to the
nervous diseases, to crime, to suicide, a suffering crowd
of men of no defined position, of knights or marquises
who in a collectivist re'gime — once having eliminated the

i68

fever of private wealth and the uncertainty of daily bread
for the stomach and the brain — would have on the con-
trary a life less unbalanced and would be saved from
final fall through degeneracy.*

Only, whereas formerly socialists following rather the
impulse of humanitarian sentiment than the rigour of
scientific reasoning, were led to this absolute affirmation
that in a collectivist regime there would be no more
offences ; I maintained on the contrary in 1883, and I
still maintain, that the epidemic and chronic forms of
criminality — a product of degeneracy through misery and
the feverish struggle for riches — will disappear, but that
the forms rendered acute by some personal pathological
influence, by momentary delirium, by wounds, etc., (M.
Garofalo cannot have forgotten that there are offences
of people injured by wounds as well as madnesses) will
not disappear.

Similarly when a marshy country is once healthy,
endemic forms of fevers disappear, but the cases of
consumption or other acute illnesses do not completely
cease, although these become more rare with improved
hygiene.

There then is established the relation between collec-
tive property and nervous illnesses or degeneracy in
general, not only in the working and most numerous
classes, but also in the bourgeois and aristocratic class.

It now remains for me to give a rapid answer to his
rare observations on the relations which exist between
contemporary socialism and the broad lines of scientific
and positive thought, observations which should have
been the principal objective of the book.

Let us leave on one side the arguments which I had
developed on this subject whilst observing that there is
an intimate connection between economic and social
variation (Marx), and the theories of biological variation
(Darwin) and of universal variation (Spencer). M.
Garofalo has thought it prudent to occupy himself solely

* M. Garofalo in the French translation adds some pages (291) to answer
these observations. But first he repeats, without saying so, my argument
that nervous affections exist also among the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy
without remarking that it is still the effect of private property which con-
demns the majority to degeneracy through misery and the minority to
degeneracy from abuse of life or from feverish competition in life.'

In the second place he says that it is not misery which engenders de-
generacy, which produces misery, repeating the verses of Horace that death
and disease knock "with equal foot" at the door of the garret and of the
palace. The verses of Horace are contradicted by demographic statistics
which prove a shorter longevity among the poor. And as to degeneracy
being a source of misery, that is true also, but it is the exception for a
few individuals.

The degeneracy of the masses is only produced by their misery and it
is really superfluous to give proofs of it.

with the "struggle for existence" and with the relations
that exist between "evolution and revolution."

As for the first, five pages (96-100) are sufficient for
him to affirm, without supporting his affirmation by any
positive demonstration which is not merely an expression
of the same idea couched in different words, that the
Darwinian law of the struggle for existence has not
undergone, and will not undergo, any transformation
beyond that which will change the violent struggle of
competition (the struggle of skill and intelligence), and
that this law is irreconcilable with socialism, for it
necessarily exacts the sacrifice of the conquered, whilst
socialism would assure to all men material existence so
that they would not have to trouble about it.

But my friend, Baron Garofalo, passes by in complete
silence the fundamental argument that socialists oppose
to the individualist interpretation which has been given
up till now of the struggle for life, and which still
influences some socialists so much as to make them think
the struggle for life is not true and that Darwinism is
irreconcilable with socialism.*

Socialists, in fact, think that the laws of life are the
following, concurrent and inseparable in their action :
the struggle for existence and solidarity in the struggle
against natural forces. If the first law has an individual-
istic spirit, the second has one essentially socialistic.

Now, in order not to repeat what I have written else-
where, it is sufficient for me to state here this positive
fact, that every human evolution is realised by an ever
increasing predominance of the law of solidarity' over
the law of the struggle for existence.

The forms of the struggle change and become attenu-
ated, as I have stated, since 1883, and M. Garofalo
accepts this point of view when he recognises that the
muscular struggle tends always to become the intel-
lectual struggle. But he has only formal evolution in
view, he takes no account of its progressively attenuated
functional relation in face of the other parallel law of
solidarity in the struggle.

Here intervenes this constant principle of sociology
that the social forms and forces always co-exist, but with

* Professor Labriola has recently repeated, without proving it, this
assertion that socialism is not reconcilable with Darwinism. Sur le Mani-
feste de Marx it Ength in the Devenir social, June, 1895.

It is however very strange that there are some socialists who think
that, under the pretext of a so-called irreconcilability between Darwinism
and socialism the simple solution of the difficulty is to anathematise
Darwinism.

I believe, onjhe contrary, that it is more important to examine Dar-
winism from the point of view, not of its individualistic and false inter-
pretations, but in its positive spirit of biological variation, which is evidently
founded on universal variation at the same time that it is the base of economic
and social variation.

170

a successive predominance that changes from epoch to
epoch and from place to place.

Just as with the individual, egoism and altruism co-
exist, and will always co-exist — for egoism is the personal
basis of existence — but with a progression continually
restrictive and transformative of egoism as opposed to
altruism, passing from the ferocious egoism of savage
humanity to the less brutal egoism of the present epoch
and to the more fraternal egoism of the society to come,
just as in the social organism, for example, the warlike
type and the industrial type always co-exist, but with a
progressive predominance of the latter over the former.

Just the same again the different types of constitution
of the family always co-exist, but with a different pre-
dominance at different epochs ; just as to-day in every
civilised society, although the monogamic type (to-day
by joint action and legal fiction, later by free consent)
predominates much over other family types, yet one
always finds in all countries both sexual community
(masculine and feminine prostitution), and the union of
one wife with several husbands (one legal and the others
extra legal), and also the union of one husband with
several wives (one legal and the others extra legal).

It is the same with many other institutions of which
Spencerian sociology had only given the descriptive evo-
lution, and of which the Marxian theory of economic
determinism has given us the generic evolution, by
explaining that customs, religious and juridical institu-
tions, social types, family forms, etc., are only the
reflection of the economic structure, which differs accord-
ing to place (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 for every social group the
resultant of the energies of race developing themselves
in such and such physical environment, as I have said
elsewhere.

The same rule holds good for the two co-existing laws
of the struggle for existence and solidarity in the struggle,
of which the first predominates (such as primitive
morals, war, slavery, etc.) where the economic conditions
are the most difficult, whilst the second predominates
where the economic security of the greater number
increases. But the latter, whilst completely developing
in a socialist regime and by assuring material life to
every man who works, will not exclude the intellectual
forms of the struggle for existence, which M. Tchisch
said ought to be interpreted in the sense not only of a
struggle for life, but also of a struggle for the increase
of life*

* Tchisch La /«»' fondamentale de la. vie, Dorpat, 1895, p. 19.

In fact, when the material life of each man is once
secured along with the duty of work for all those asso-
ciated together, a man will always be struggling for the
greatest development of his physical and moral person-
ality. And it is only in the socialist re'gime that the
predominance of the law of solidarity being decisive, the
struggle for existence will change its form and scope,
whilst persisting in an eternal struggle towards a better
life in the joint development of the individual and the
aggregate.*

But M. Garofalo occupies himself more with the
practical (?) relations between socialism and the law of
evolution than with this apparently theoretical problem.
And substantially taking up for his purpose the objection
so many times made to Marxism and to its tactics, he
thus formulates his prosecutor's speech :

" The new socialists who on the one side pretend to
speak in the name of sociological science, on the other
side declare themselves politically as revolutionaries.
Now it is evident that science has nothing more to do
here. Although they are careful to say that by 'revolu-
tion' they do not mean a riot or a revolt, a thing which
the dictionary, moreover, explains, this always remains :
that they will not await the spontaneous organisation of
society in the new economic arrangement caught sight
of by them in a future more or less distant ; otherwise,
who among them would survive to prove to the incredu-
lous the truth of their predictions."

" We are, therefore, concerned with a revolution'
artificially hastened, that is to say, in other terms, with
the use of force to transform society according to their
desire " (page 30).

" The socialists of the school of Marx do not expect
the transformation of a slow evolution, but a revolution
of the people, of which they even fix the period" (p. 53).

" It is indispensable that socialists should decide from
now to be :

"Either theoretical evolutionists who AWAIT PATIENTLY

FOR THE TIME TO BE RIPE,

" Or, on the contrary, revolutionary democrats, and
then it is useless to speak of evolution, accumulation,
spontaneous concentration, etc. MAKE THE REVOLUTION

THEN IF YOU HAVE THE POWER " (p. 151).

On the subject of the social question the attitudes in

* Recently M. Pioger, La vie tociale, etc., Paris, 1894, showed that "the
idea of increasing solidarity is the ultimate and most general result of all
that constitute*- scientific knowledge."

Now, since socialism is based principally on the idea of solidarity,
whilst individualism is based essentially on antagonism more or less
marked, the agreement of socialism with contemporary scientific thought
is put once again in full evidence.

tj*

the scientific domain or in the political domain are the
following : —

(1) That of the conservatives such as M. Garofalo,
those falling into the easy terror of automorphism — so
well pointed out by Mr. Spencer — which makes them
judge the world, not following the conditions objectively
established, but following the subjective impression, con-
sidering that they are very comfortable in the present
regime — these maintain that all is for the best in the
best of all possible worlds, and oppose everywhere, with
a very logical egoism, every change which is not limited
to one on the surface.

(2) That of the reformers, who, like all eclectics, of
whom infinitus est numerus, give thus, as the Italian
proverb says, one blow to the cask and another to the
hoop, and do not deny — oh no ! — the inconveniences and
absurdities even of the present ; but, in order not to
compromise themselves too far, hasten to say that they
must confine themselves to retouches, superficial reforms,
that is to say, to those symptomatic cases which are as
easy as they are inconclusive in personal as in social
medicine.

(3) Finally, there are the revolutionaries who call
themselves thus just because they think and say that the
efficacious remedy is not in superficial reforms but in a
radical reorganisation, beginning at the basis itself of
private property, and which will be so profound that it
will justly form a social revolution.

It is in this sense that Galileo made a scientific revolu-
tion, for he did not confine himself to the reforms of the
astronomical system admitted in his time, but he radi-
cally changed the fundamental lines. And it is in the
same sense that Jacquart made an industrial revolution
because he did not confine himself to reforming the
hand-loom which had existed for centuries, but he
radically changed its structure and productive power.

Thus, when socialism is called revolutionary, it is
understood that we are speaking of the programme to
be realised, and of the final end to be attained, and not
as M. Garofalo, in spite of the dictionary, continues to
believe — of the method or tactics with which to attain
this end of the social revolution.

And it is just here that the profound difference is
shown between the methods of sentimental socialism and
of scientific socialism (henceforth the only socialism in
the civilised world), which has received through Marx,
Engels, and their followers, the systematic organisation
necessitated by the method of evolution. And that is
why and how I have been able to show that contem-
porary socialism is in complete agreement with the
positive doctrine of evolution.

Socialism, in fact, calls itself revolutionist, but not in

173

the sense which M. Garofalo prefers of "patiently wait-
ing until the times are ripe," and till society "organises
itself spontaneously in the new economic arrangement,"
as if science should consist in the Hindu contemplation
of the navel, and in academic Platonism — which it has
done for too long — instead of asking of real and daily
life the reasons for its existence and the application of
its inductions.

There is the question of method and tactics which
distinguishes Utopian socialism from scientific socialism ;
the former imagined it could change the economic organ-
isation of the world from the top to the bottom by the
improvised miracle of a popular insurrection ; the latter,
however, declares that the law of evolution is sovereign
and consequently that the social revolution can only be
the last phase of a previous evolution which will consist
— through scientific research and propaganda — in the
realisation of the cry of Marx : Proletarians of all
countries, unite I

There then is the easy enigma explained, which brings
it about that socialism, revolutionary in its programme,
follows the laws of evolution in its method of realisa-
tion, and therefore is so full of life, just as it is substan-
tially different from the mystical and violent anarchism
that class prejudices and the exigences of a corrupt
journalism claim to be only a consequence of socialism,
whereas it is its practical negation.

During several years, whilst defending the positivist
school of criminology, I had personal experience of the
inevitable phases which a scientific truth must traverse
before conquering its " freedom of the city " — the con-
spiracy of silence ; the attempt to stifle the new idea
under ridicule ; then, in consequence of the resistance to
these artifices of misoneism, the new ideas are falsified,
either by ignorance or to make it easier to combat them ;
at last it is partially admitted, and this is the beginning
of its final triumph.

So that, knowing these phases of the natural evolution
of every new idea, now that, for the second time, instead
of reposing on my first scientific victories, I have wished
to fight for a second and more burning heresy, the
victory appears to me more certain, since my opponents
and my ancient companions in arms renew again the
same artifices of miseonist opposition of which I have
already ascertained the impotence in a more restricted
field of battle, but where the fight was not less lively
nor less difficult.

174

And — a new soldier enlisted for a great and noble
human ideal — I am already assisting in the spectacle of
partial and inevitable concessions, torn from those who
desire not to compromise, very terrible in appearance, but
vain and untenable in relation to the great cry of pain
and hope which rises from the depths of the human hive
in the shudderings of hearts and the labours of science.

ENRICO FERRI.

Garden City Tress Limited^ Letchivorth, Herts.

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Socialism and positive
F55 science. 5th ed.
1909