the shocking inequality of economic conditions, hunger, acute and
chronic, will no longer serve as a stimulus to crime. Better nourishment
will bring about a physical and moral improvement. The abuses of power
and of wealth will disappear, and there will be a considerable
diminution in the number of crimes due to circumstances (_crimes
d'occasion_), crimes caused principally by the social environment. But
there are some crimes which will not disappear, such as revolting crimes
against decency due to a pathological perversion of the sexual instinct,
homicides induced by epilepsy, thefts which result from a
psycho-pathological degeneration, etc.

For the same reasons popular education will be more widely diffused,
talents of every kind will be able to develop and manifest themselves
freely; but this will not cause the disappearance of idiocy and
imbecility due to hereditary pathological conditions. Nevertheless it
will be possible for different causes to have a preventive and
mitigating influence on the various forms of congenital degeneration
(ordinary diseases, criminality, insanity and nervous disorders). Among
these preventive influences may be: a better economic and social
organization, the prudential counsels, constantly growing in efficacy
given by experimental biology, and less and less frequent procreation,
by means of voluntary abstention, in cases of hereditary disease.

To conclude we will say that, even under the socialist regime--although
they will be infinitely fewer--there will always be some who will be
vanquished in the struggle for existence--these will be the victims of
weakness, of disease, of dissipation, of nervous disorders, of suicide.
We may then affirm that socialism does not deny the Darwinian law of the
struggle for existence. Socialism will, however, have this indisputable
advantage--the epidemic or endemic forms of human degeneracy will be
entirely suppressed by the elimination of their principal cause--the
physical poverty and (its necessary consequence) the mental suffering of
the majority.

Then the struggle for existence, while remaining always the driving
power of the life of society, will assume forms less and less brutal and
more and more humane. It will become an intellectual struggle. Its ideal
of physiological and intellectual progress will constantly grow in
grandeur and sublimity when this progressive idealization of the ideal
shall be made possible by the guarantee to every on