i68 



fever of private wealth and the uncertainty of daily bread 

 for the stomach and the brain would have on the con- 

 trary a life less unbalanced and would be saved from 

 final fall through degeneracy.* 



Only, whereas formerly socialists following rather the 

 impulse of humanitarian sentiment than the rigour of 

 scientific reasoning, were led to this absolute affirmation 

 that in a collectivist regime there would be no more 

 offences ; I maintained on the contrary in 1883, and I 

 still maintain, that the epidemic and chronic forms of 

 criminality a product of degeneracy through misery and 

 the feverish struggle for riches will disappear, but that 

 the forms rendered acute by some personal pathological 

 influence, by momentary delirium, by wounds, etc., (M. 

 Garofalo cannot have forgotten that there are offences 

 of people injured by wounds as well as madnesses) will 

 not disappear. 



Similarly when a marshy country is once healthy, 

 endemic forms of fevers disappear, but the cases of 

 consumption or other acute illnesses do not completely 

 cease, although these become more rare with improved 

 hygiene. 



There then is established the relation between collec- 

 tive property and nervous illnesses or degeneracy in 

 general, not only in the working and most numerous 

 classes, but also in the bourgeois and aristocratic class. 



It now remains for me to give a rapid answer to his 

 rare observations on the relations which exist between 

 contemporary socialism and the broad lines of scientific 

 and positive thought, observations which should have 

 been the principal objective of the book. 



Let us leave on one side the arguments which I had 

 developed on this subject whilst observing that there is 

 an intimate connection between economic and social 

 variation (Marx), and the theories of biological variation 

 (Darwin) and of universal variation (Spencer). M. 

 Garofalo has thought it prudent to occupy himself solely 



* M. Garofalo in the French translation adds some pages (291) to answer 

 these observations. But first he repeats, without saying so, my argument 

 that nervous affections exist also among the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy 

 without remarking that it is still the effect of private property which con- 

 demns the majority to degeneracy through misery and the minority to 

 degeneracy from abuse of life or from feverish competition in life.' 



In the second place he says that it is not misery which engenders de- 

 generacy, which produces misery, repeating the verses of Horace that death 

 and disease knock "with equal foot" at the door of the garret and of the 

 palace. The verses of Horace are contradicted by demographic statistics 

 which prove a shorter longevity among the poor. And as to degeneracy 

 being a source of misery, that is true also, but it is the exception for a 

 few individuals. 



The degeneracy of the masses is only produced by their misery and it 

 is really superfluous to give proofs of it. 



