while, in fact, it is seldom present. This is the
anthropological factor, which may assume a pathological form, in which
case articles 46 and 47 of the penal code remember that there is such a
thing as the personality of the criminal. However, aside from insanity,
there are thousands of other organic and psychological conditions of the
personality of criminals, which a judge might perhaps lump together
under the name of extenuating circumstances, but which science desires
to have thoroughly investigated. This is not done today, and for this
reason the idea of extenuating circumstances constitutes a denial of
justice.

This same anthropological factor also includes that which each one of us
has: the race character. Nowadays the influence of race on the destinies
of peoples and persons is much discussed in sociology, and there are
one-sided schools that pretend to solve the problems of history and
society by means of that racial influence alone, to which they attribute
an absolute importance. But while there are some who maintain that the
history of peoples is nothing but the exclusive product of racial
character, there are others who insist that the social conditions of
peoples and individuals are alone determining. The one is as much a
one-sided and incomplete theory as the other. The study of collective
society or of the single individual has resulted in the understanding
that the life of society and of the individual is always the product of
the inextricable net of the anthropological, telluric and social
elements. Hence the influence of the race cannot be ignored in the study
of nations and personalities, although it is not the exclusive factor
which would suffice to explain the criminality of a nation or an
individual. Study, for instance, manslaughter in Italy, and, although
you will find it difficult to isolate one of the factors of criminality
from the network of the other circumstances and conditions that produce
it, yet there are such eloquent instances of the influence of racial
character, that it would be like denying the existence of daylight if
one tried to ignore the influence of the ethnical factor on
criminality.

In Italy there are two currents of criminality, two tendencies which are
almost diametrically opposed to one another. The crimes due to hot blood
and muscle grow in intensity from northern to southern Italy, while the
crimes against property increase from south to north. In northern Italy,
wh