lo is, in the most elementary accuracy, in the
ascertainment of facts when we recall the suffering and ever-growing
multitude of the _unemployed_, which is sometimes a "local and
transitory" phenomenon, but which, in its acute or chronic forms, is
always the necessary and incontestable effect of capitalist
accumulation and the introduction and improvement of machinery, which
are, in their turn, the source of modern socialism, scientific
socialism, so different from the sentimental socialism of former times.

* * * * *

But the fundamental fallacy, from which so many thinkers--M. Garofalo
among them--can not free themselves, and to which I myself yielded,
before I had penetrated, thanks to the Marxian theory of historic
materialism--or, more exactly, of economic determinism--into the true
spirit of socialist sociology, is the tendency to judge the inductions
of socialism by the biological, psychological and sociological data of
the present society, without thinking of the necessary changes that will
be effected by a different economic environment with its inevitable
concomitants or consequences, different moral and political
environments.

In M. Garofalo's book we find once more this _petitio principii_ which
refuses to believe in the future in the name of the present, which is
declared immutable. It is exactly as if in the earliest geological
epochs it had been concluded from the flora and fauna then existing that
it was impossible for a fauna and flora ever to exist differing from
them as widely as do the cryptogams from the conifers, or the mammalia
from the mollusca.

This confirms, once more, the observation that I made before, that to
deny the truth of scientific socialism is implicitly to deny that law of
universal and eternal evolution, which is the dominant factor in all
modern scientific thought.

On page 16, M. Garofalo predicts that with the triumph of socialism "we
shall see re-appear upon earth the reign of irrational and brutal
physical force, and that we shall witness, _as happens every day_ in the
lowest strata of the population, the triumph of the most violent men."
And he repeats this on pages 209-210; but he forgets that, given the
socialist premise of a better organized social environment, this
brutality, which is the product of the present misery and lack of
education, must necessarily gradually diminish, and at last disappear.

Now, the possibility of this impr