Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/443

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 429

Italian Anarchism. Not many years after the execution of Agesilas Milano, for the attempted murder of King Ferdinand II, in 1856, Naples paid great honor to his memory ; a monument was errected to him, and King Victor Emanuel was present at its inauguration. An Italian general pompously described the would-be murderer as a hero unsurpassed in ancient or modern times.

When we remember that one-third of the 150 regicides committed during this century in Europe and America were the work of Italians, we feel no surprise at the fact that Italy has never really execrated these assassins, and that often the strangely misshapen popular sentiment has gone so far as to place them on a pedestal of a

Brutus Caesare Lombroso, Enrico Perri, R. Laschi, and other representatives

of the Italian school of criminal jurisprudence, have raised this popular sympathy for political crime to the rank and dignity of a scientific theory; for, in their opinion, such crimes represent a social function, and are not infrequently symptoms of progress.

Crime usually manifests itself in two principal and typical forms the savage,

primitive, and brutal; and the refined, modern, and civilized Italy, unfortunately,

holds the very first place in the criminal world for the first type, which might be termed atavistic, as her specific crimes are murder, robbery, and violence in all its forms. Suffice it to say that for every hundred murders committed in England and Wales, no less than two thousand similar crimes take place in Italy, or twenty times as many. .... In Rome, with a population considerably under half a million, no fewer than 3,500 stabbing and shooting affrays take place every year.

There is a close connection between anarchism and criminal sects in Italy, and, indeed, criminal anarchism may be said to have derived its sectarian character from

them and from brigandage Until quite recently brigandage presented certain

features that could be invested with a cloak of romance, almost amounting to heroism, so that not seldom these robber chieftains were sincerely mourned by the lower classes, when captured or killed.

By an easy transition, anarchy took birth as the spiritual heir of this movement, and under the burning sun of the South there were hatched, as by magic, such creatures as Caserio, Angiolillo, Acciarito, Luccheni, Bresci, and others. In anarchism, as it exists in Italy, we are face to face with a strange social phenomenon, which enables us to study the effects of nineteenth-century civilization upon a secular Italian institu- tion for as such brigandage must be regarded. The result is a transmutation into anarchism.

One thing is ever present to the Italian anarchist, and that is the profound mal- content and dissatisfaction of all classes in modern Italy with a government which has undertaken a most disastrous experiment in state socialism, as understood by two

leading German professors in political economy, Schmoller and Adolf Wagner

There is not an Italian who does not attribute the terrible and profound financial calamities of his country to the mistaken action of the government. And it is diffi- cult now to meet a young Italian of a certain degree of culture who does not style himself a "literary anarchist," or at least a "Marxian socialist."

Dazzled by the honor paid to regicides who, in hope of liberating their country from tyranny, attempted to kill the king of Naples or the Grand Uuke of Tuscany, these anarchists, who have all the characteristics calculated to predispose them to passionate crime, still believe that they too accomplish a humanitarian mission in murdering a prime minister, a king, or a president of a republic, who represents to their morbid imagination all the responsibilities and crimes of a political regime which has become odious to the mass of the population. G. M. FRAMINGO, in The Contemporary Review, September, 1900. B. F. S.

Trusts and Industrial Combinations. This study of facts regarding indus- trial combinations embodies the results of reports made by forty-one combinations. Twenty-four of the forty combinations reporting as to date of organization were formed in the years 1898 and 1899; of those formed before 1898 five were organized in 1891. One was formed as early as 1865.

Probably the most important economic effect of combinations is to be found in their influence upon prices ; next, that of their influence upon wages. The general result of the study of the prices in the specific instances where the margin between