Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/218

206 and England, whither people resort from all parts of the world, and where, when anarchy shows itself, it is like a meteor falling to the earth from the extra-planetary regions—wholly isolated and opposed to the world around it.

The most important cause of this transformation is the misery that weighs upon our unfortunate country, evidence of which comes in from every side even upon those who are not miserable themselves. If even in the latest days Luccheni had been living comfortably, he could not, with the excessively morbid altruism that dominated him, have failed to feel this misery, which is so profound and general in Italy.

Not much erudition is required to demonstrate the immense economical embarrassment of Italy as contrasted with other countries when it is known that we pay about five hundred times its value for salt, that bread is growing dearer every day, and that the amount consumed diminishes one tenth every year in these lands.

It was, therefore, with justice that Scarfoglio said in explaining the origin of anarchism, "A good fifth of the population of Italy are still living in a savage state, dwelling in cabins that the Papuans would not live in, accommodating themselves to a food which the Shillooks would refuse, having a vision and an idea of the world not much more ample than that of the Kaffirs, and running over the land desiring and seeking servitude."

It may be added that it is because of this condition—that is, of the defective civilization that results from it—that there is everywhere a weakened revulsion and diminished horror at blood-crimes, so that there are now sixty homicides for every one hundred thousand inhabitants.

We may learn from this what the true remedies should be. The idea of conquering anarchy by killing anarchists is not valid, because every epileptic has another ready to take his place, because anarchistic crimes are to a great extent simply indirect suicides, and because anarchists think as little of their own lives as of the life of another. It is rather necessary to change the direction of the disease by changing the miserable conditions in which it originates.

Not for humanity, therefore, not for exalted social theories, but in our direct interest, we ought to make a complete change. The suppression of a dozen anarchists is like killing a thousand microbes without disinfecting the surroundings that contain milliards of them; it is that we should look, if we want to be better, to breaking up the large estates, and ameliorating the conditions of agriculture and operative industry, and this in the interest of the governing classes.

Typhus, cholera, and plague, it is true, attack chiefly the poor, but from these the contagion extends also to the rich; and from the