problem, and they could not have asked it, considering their point of departure and their method. In fact, the classic criminologists accept the phenomenon of criminality as an accomplished fact. They analyze it from the point of view of the technical jurist, without asking how this criminal fact may have been produced, and why it repeats itself in greater or smaller numbers from year to year, in every country. The theory of a free will, which is their foundation, excludes the possibility of this scientific question, for according to it the crime is the product of the fiat of the human will. And if that is admitted as a fact, there is nothing left to account for. The manslaughter was committed, because the criminal wanted to commit it; and that is all there is to it. Once the theory of a free will is accepted as a fact, the deed depends on the fiat, the voluntary determination, of the criminal, and all is said.

But if, on the other hand, the positive school of criminology denies, on the ground of researches in scientific physiological psychology, that the human will is free and does not admit that one is a criminal because he wants to be, but declares that a man commits this or that crime only when he lives in definitely determined conditions of personality and environment which induce him necessarily to act in a certain way, then alone does the problem of the origin of criminality begin to be submitted to a preliminary analysis, and then alone does criminal law step out of the narrow and arid limits of technical jurisprudence and become a true social and human science in the highest and noblest meaning of the word. It is vain to insist with such stubbornness as that of the classic school of criminology on juristic formulas by which the distinction between illegal appropriation and theft, between fraud and other forms of crime against property, and so forth, is determined, when this method does not give to society one single word which would throw light upon the reasons that make a man a criminal and upon the efficacious remedy by which society could protect itself against criminality.

It is true that the classic school of criminology has likewise its remedy against crime—namely, punishment. But this is the only remedy of that school, and in all the legislation inspired by the theories of that school in all the countries of the civilized world there is no other remedy against crime but repression.

But Bentham has said: Every time that punishment is inflicted it proves its inefficacy, for it did not prevent the committal of that crime. Therefore, this remedy is worthless. And a deeper study of the cause of crime demonstrates that if a man does not commit a certain crime, this is due to entirely different reasons, than a fear of the penalty, very strong and fundamental reasons which are not to be found in the threats of legislators. These threats, if nevertheless carried out by police and prison keepers, run counter to those conditions. A man who intends to commit a crime, or who is carried away by a violent passion, by a psychological hurricane which drowns his moral sense, is not checked by threats of punishment, because the volcanic eruption of passion prevents him from reflecting. Or he may decide to commit a crime after due premeditation and preparation, and in that case the penalty is powerless to check him, because he hopes to escape with impunity. All criminals will tell you unanimously that the only thing which impelled them when they were deliberating a crime was the expectation that they would go scot free. If they had but the least suspicion that they might be detected and punished they would not have committed the crime. The only exception is the case in which a crime is the result of a mental explosion caused by a violent outburst of passion. And if you wish to have a very convincing illustration of the psychological inefficacy of legal threats, you have but to think of that curious crime which has now assumed a frequency never known to former centuries, namely the making of counterfeit money. For since paper money—from want or for reasons of expediency—has become a substitute of metal coin in the civilized countries, the making of counterfeit paper money has become very frequent in the nineteenth century. Now a counterfeiter, in committing his crime, must compel his mind to imitate closely the inscription of the bill, letter for letter, including that threatening passage, which says: "The law punishes counterfeiting ..." etc. Can you see before your mind's eye a counterfeiter, in the act of engraving on the stone or the others may ignore the penalty that awaits them, but he cannot. This illustration is convincing, for in cases of other crimes one may always assume that the criminal acted without thinking of the future, even when he was not in a transport of passion. But in the case of the counterfeiter the very act of committing the crime reminds him of the threat of the law, and yet he is imperturbable while perpetrating it.

Crime has its natural causes, which lie outside of that mathematical point called the free will of the criminal. Aside from being a juridical phenomenon, which it would be well to examine by itself, every crime is above all a natural and social phenomenon, and should be studied primarily as such. We need not go through so hard a course of study merely for the purpose of walking over the razor edge of juristic definitions and to find out, for instance, that from the time Romagnosi made a distinction between incompleted and attempted crime rivers of ink have been spilled in the attempt to find the distinguishing elements of these two degrees of crime. And finally, when the German legislator concluded to make no distinction between incompleted and attempted crime and to recognize only the completed crime in his code of 1871, we witnessed the spectacle of Carrara praising that legislator for leaving that subtile distinction out of his code. A strange conclusion on the part of a science, which cudgels its brains for a century to find the marks of distinction between attempted and incompleted crime, and then praises the legislator for ignoring it. And another classic jurist, Buccellati, proposed to do away with the theory of attempted crime by simply defining it as a crime by itself, or as—a violation of police laws! A science which comes to such conclusions is a science which moves in metaphysical abstractions, and we shall see that all these finespun questions which abound in classical science lose all practical value before the necessity of saving society from the plague of crime.

The method which we, on the other hand, have inaugurated is the following: Before we study crime from the point of view of a juristic phenomenon, we must study the causes to which the annual recurrence of crimes in all countries is due. These are natural causes, which I have classified under the three heads of anthropological, telluric and social. Every crime, from the smallest to the most atrocious, is the result of the interaction of these three causes, the anthropological condition of the criminal, the telluric environment in which he is living, and the social environment in which he is born, living and operating. It is a vain beginning to separate the meshes of this net of criminality. There are still those who would maintain the one-sided standpoint that the origin of crime may be traced to only one of these elements, for instance, to the social element alone. So far as I am concerned, I have combatted this opinion from the very inauguration of the positive school of criminology, and I combat it today. It is certainly easy enough to think that the entire origin of all crime is due to the unfavorable social conditions in which the criminal lives. But an objective, methodical, observation demonstrates that social conditions alone do not suffice to explain the origin of criminality, although it is true that the prevalence of the influence of social conditions is an incontestable fact in the case of the greater number of crimes, especially of the lesser ones. But there are