eparation for further
sacrifices than as an honour or reward."

IV

_Political Crime (Delitto Politico)_

(In Collaboration with Rodolfo Laschi)

The law of inertia governs nature. Every organism tends to adhere
indefinitely to the same mode of life and will not change unless forced
to do so.

In the depths of the ocean, where existence, comparatively speaking, is
uniform and undisturbed, we still find organisms allied to the species
of pre-historic epochs. Those stars and suns, which are outside the
sphere of action of other worlds, continue eternally their vertiginous
gyrations in the trajectories assigned to them at the beginning of all
things.

Every progress in nature is the result of a struggle between the
tendency to immobility, manifested by misoneism, or the hatred of
novelty, and a foreign force which seeks to conquer this tendency.

As in nature, misoneism dominates every human community. It is most
invincible in children and neuropathic and insane individuals, very
powerful among barbarous peoples, and more or less disguised among
civilised nations. But the world progresses: every day new conditions
and new interests arise to combat the law of inertia and render
impossible the realisation of the much-desired invariability; and
progress, unwelcome yet inevitable, prevails.

By political crime we understand every action which attacks the laws,
the historical, economical, political and social traditions of a nation
or, in fact, any part of the existing social fabric, and which comes
into collision with the law of inertia.

Any attempt to obtain forcibly a change in existing systems, to enforce
by violence, for instance, the claims of free trade in a protectionist
country, to plunge a nation into war or to incite workers to strike--all
such actions represent the first steps in political crime, which reaches
its climax in revolts and insurrections, and which victory alone can
exalt above a host of blameworthy and base deeds, and crown with glory.

Revolution is the struggle between the tendency to immobility innate in
a community, and the force which urges it to move. Revolution is the
historical expression of evolution and has always great and sublime ends
in view. It is the struggle against an institution or a system which
hinders the progress of a nation, never against any temporary
oppression, no matter how unbearable it may be. The French revolution
was not a struggle against an individual kin