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 



