what remedies the positive school of criminology
proposes for each one of these categories of criminals, in distinction
from the measuring of doses of imprisonment advocated by the classic
school.

We have thus exhausted in a short and general review the subject of the
natural origin of criminality.--To sum up, crime is a social
phenomenon, due to the interaction of anthropological, telluric, and
social factors. This law brings about what I have called criminal
saturation, which means that every society has the criminality which it
deserves, and which produces by means of its geographical and social
conditions such quantities and qualities of crime as correspond to the
development of each collective human group.

Thus the old saying of Imetelet is confirmed: "There is an annual
balance of crime, which must be paid and settled with greater regularity
than the accounts of the national revenue." However, we positivists give
to this statement a less fatalistic interpretation, since we have
demonstrated that crime is not our immutable destiny, even though it is
a vain beginning to attempt to attenuate or eliminate crime by mere
schemes. The truth is that the balance of crime is determined by the
physical and social environment. But by changing the condition of the
social environment, which is most easily modified, the legislator may
alter the influence of the telluric environment and the organic and
psychic conditions of the population, control the greater portion of
crimes, and reduce them considerably. It is our firm conviction that a
truly civilized legislator can attenuate the plague of criminality, not
so much by means of the criminal code, as by means of remedies which are
latent in the remainder of the social life and of legislation. And the
experience of the most advanced countries confirms this by the
beneficent and preventive influence of criminal legislation resting on
efficacious social reforms.

We arrive, then, at this scientific conclusion: In the society of the
future, the necessity for penal justice will be reduced to the extent
that social justice grows intensively and extensively.

III.

In the preceding two lectures, I have given you a short review of the
new current in scientific thought, which studies the painful and
dangerous phenomena of criminality. We must now draw the logical
conclusions, in theory and practice, from the teachings of experimented
science, for the removal of the gangrenous