"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. 



* 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 



