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. 



