with them and lead to victory with their
propaganda, their inspired songs, and thrilling accents. Tyrtaeus was not
the only poet who led soldiers to war: every insurrection has had its
own songs, in which the love of a whole people is crystallised.

Lunatics, unbalanced individuals, and saints are the promoters of
progress and revolutions. These types have one thing in common--their
passionate devotion to a sublime ideal and their love for humanity,
which torments and crushes them in every case where they fail to attain
that for which they have fought. But whether victorious or defeated, on
the throne or on the scaffold, their efforts are not lost. Love is the
spiritual sun of mankind. A ray shed by a human heart may spread far and
wide, traversing unknown regions and sojourning with unknown races; and
if powerless to revive some timid flower that has been numbed by the
chilly night, it may still be stored up in the songs of a people, like
the sunlight in green plants, to be retransformed at some future time
into light and warmth.

V

_Too Soon! (Troppo Presto!)_

(A Criticism of the New Italian Penal Code)

In this book, which was written during the interval between the
publication of the new Penal Code and its sanction by the Italian
Parliament, my father makes a rapid criticism of the Code, which he
considered premature. Only a few decades had elapsed since the
proclamation of Italian Unity; and the widely differing races that
people the provinces constituting the kingdom of Italy had not been able
in that brief period to acquire sufficient uniformity of customs to make
a single code of laws desirable.

But the book is not merely a criticism. It also contains an exposition
of the fundamental principles that, according to my father, should
underlie every serious and efficacious code of laws. It is this part
that makes this somewhat hastily written book of such importance to
criminologists; because it sets forth under the chief heads the
juridical desiderata of the New School.

The following brief extract gives an indication of the nature of these
principles:

1. The legislation of a country should always be regulated by the
customs of the people whom it is to govern; and although a system of
different penal codes to suit the varying races and customs in the
different regions of one State may offer certain disadvantages, they are
always of less importance than the difficulties caused by a uniform
code.