CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN ITALY. 755 



Howard, have fulfilled the historic mission of decreasing the pun- 

 ishments, as the reaction from the severity of the mediaeval laws,, 

 the object of the positivist school is to decrease the offenses by 

 investigating their natural and social causes in order to apply social 

 remedies more efficacious and more humane than the penal counter- 

 action, always slow in its effects, especially in its cellular system, 

 which I have called one of the aberrations of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury." 



Ferri has occupied himself less with the instinctive than with the 

 occasional criminal, and his clear and philosophic spirit has placed 

 him at the head of criminal sociologists. Elected to Parliament 

 even before the age of thirty, previous to which he could not take his 

 place, according to Italian law, he began an avowed liberal, but soon 

 passed over to the ranks of scientific socialists, whose acknowledged 

 leader he has since become. He also holds the post of professor of 

 penal law at the Roman University. But his home is on the vine- 

 and olive-clad shores of Etruscan Fiesole, within a short walk of 

 Florence. Of his great work on Homicide we have treated at 

 length in these pages. Though in some points he has grown to differ 

 from him, Ferri continues to venerate his master Lombroso, and 

 with rare eloquence defends his theories from attacks at moments 

 when the less eloquent scientist seems silenced by the arguments of 

 his adversaries. It was due to his energy, conjoined to the initiative 

 of Lombroso, that the first International Congress of Criminal An- 

 thropologists was held in Rome in 1885, which constituted the 

 installation of international criminal anthropology in sight of 

 the European public. The second was held at Paris in 1889. It 

 was there that the scientific misunderstanding arose, which was still 

 more openly affirmed at the third congress held at Brussels in 1892, 

 but was finally and conclusively beaten down at Geneva at the 

 fourth congress in 1896; a result in a large measure due to Ferri's 

 fascinating, all-persuading eloquence. In a letter written to 

 me he has stated the whole matter so clearly that I can not do 

 better than reproduce the same : " As you know, the positive school 

 of criminal studies was consolidated in Italy by the contemporaneous 

 publication in 1878 of the second volume of the Uomo Delinquente, 

 of my volume on the Imputableness and Negation of Free Will, and 

 of the pamphlet of Garofolo on the Positive Criterion of Penalty. 

 In these first affirmations there naturally preponderated the conclu- 

 sions of Lombroso, which gave and left on the public the im- 

 pression that the new school only studied the criminal from his 

 organic side as a biological monstrosity. Yet, in 1880, I had 

 published my studies on Criminals in France from 1826 to 1878, 

 in which I expounded the natural factors of the three orders 



