Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/778

756 of crime—anthropological, physical, and social—laying stress on the social causes that conduce to crime. As a reaction from the aforenamed impression in Italy, Turati, Colajanni, and Battaglia published in 1882 to 1884 pamphlets and volumes maintaining that crime is an exclusively social phenomenon. I replied to Turati—Crime and the Social Question—with the volumes on Socialism and Criminality (1883), now out of print, where I combated: 1. Artistic and romantic socialism while recognizing the fundamental truths of scientific socialism. 2. The unilateral theory that crime is the product only of social factors, and that, therefore, with time it must certainly disappear. Continuing to maintain these two propositions, even after my avowed adhesion to scientific socialism, it has come about that in Italy this unilateral thesis has gradually become abandoned even by socialists. On the other hand, this thesis was taken up again in 1885 at the congress in Rome, and above all in 1889 at Paris, and in 1892 at Brussels by the French anthropological criminal socialists—Lacassagne, Tarde, Topinard, Corée, etc.—who succeeded in spreading the belief that there exists a French criminal anthropological school founded on the theory that the criminal is an exclusively social phenomenon—a thesis that had, for the matter of that, already been sustained in Italy by the socialists. It is thus that was circulated among the international public, who can not read Italian publications unless they are translated, the impression that opposing the Italian school there was a French school; the former maintaining the exclusively biological origin of the criminal, while the latter regarded his genesis as exclusively social. The congress at Geneva has cleared up this misunderstanding, which has lasted too long. Crime is a phenomenon whose origin is both biological and social. This is the final conclusion which the Italian school has proclaimed since the beginning of its existence."

It is noteworthy and also significant that almost all thoughtful Italians who have dedicated themselves to the studies of anthropology in general and criminal anthropology in particular are socialists in politics. Assiduous, dispassionate observation of mankind would seem to have brought them to this conclusion. A leader in the Italian Parliament in this sense, as well as a gifted criminal anthropologist, is Napoleone Colajanni, by original profession a doctor, but now too absorbed in his political duties to practice. Colajanni is by birth a Sicilian, and has much of the quick, fiery temperament of these islanders, in whose veins the blood courses hotly. A facile orator, his speeches always command attention in Parliament, while his rigid, incorruptible honesty makes him esteemed in a milieu of unscrupulous politicians and wire-pullers. As philanthropist, as politician, he was