riated by taxation--is destined to
disappear with the socialization of the land and the means of
production:--this is the proposition that socialism maintains and
demonstrates.

It is, therefore, natural that under the socialist regime, with the
disappearance of poverty, there should be eliminated the principal
source of popular degeneracy in the epidemic and chronic forms of
diseases, crimes, insanity and suicide; this can, moreover, be seen at
present--on a small scale, but clearly enough to positively confirm the
general induction--since diseases [nervous], crimes, insanity and
suicide increase during famines and crises, while they diminish in years
when the economic conditions are less wretched.

There is still more to be said. Even among the aristocracy and
bourgeoisie, no one can fail to see that the feverish competition and
cannibalistic strife of our present system beget nervous disorders,
crime and suicide, which would be rendered quite unnecessary by the
establishment of a socialist regime, which would banish worry and
uneasiness for the morrow from the human race.

There then you see established the relation between collective ownership
and nervous diseases or degeneration in general, not only among the
popular and more numerous classes, but also in the bourgeois and
aristocratic classes.

It is, indeed, astonishing that the anti-socialist prejudice of M.
Garofalo should have been strong enough to cause him to forget that
truth which is nevertheless a legitimate induction of criminal biology
and sociology, the truth that besides the congenital criminal there are
other types of criminals who are more numerous and more directly
produced by the vitiated social environment. And, finally, if the
congenital criminal is not himself the direct product of the
environment, he is indirectly its product through the degeneration begun
in his ancestors, by some acute disease in some cases, but by
debilitating poverty in the majority of cases, and afterward
hereditarily transmitted and aggravated in accordance with the
inexorable laws discovered by modern science.

* * * * *

M. Garofalo's book, which was announced as an assault of science upon
socialism, has been, even from this point of view, a complete
disappointment, as even the Italian anti-socialists have confessed in
several of the most orthodox Reviews.

It now remains for me to reply briefly to his observations--and they are