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. 



