Moreover, the economic factor exerts its crime-breeding influence also under the form of a superabundance of wealth.  Indeed, in our present society, which is in the downward stage of transition from glorious bourgeois civilization, which constituted a golden page of human history in the 19th century, wealth itself is a source of crime.  For the rich, who do not enjoy the advantage of manual or intellectual work, suffer from the corruption of leisure and vice.  Gambling throws them into an unhealthy fever; the struggle and race for money poison their daily lives.  And although the rich may keep out of reach of the penal code, still they have condemned themselves to a life devoted to hypocritical ceremonies, which are devoid of moral sentiment.  And this life leads them to a sportive form of criminality.  To cheat at gambling is the inevitable fate of these parasites.  In order to kill time they give themselves up to games of chance, and those who do not care for that devote themselves to the sport of adultery, which in that class is a pastime even among the best friends, on account of sheer mental poverty.  And all because man’s mind unoccupied is the devil’s own forge, as the English poet says.

We have now surveyed briefly the natural genesis of crime, as a natural social phenomenon, brought about by the interaction of anthropological, telluric, and social influences, which in any determined moment act upon a personality standing on the cross road of vice and virtue, crime and honesty.  This scientific deduction gives rise to a series of investigations which satisfy the mind and supply it with a real understanding of things, far better than the theory that a man is a criminal because he wants to be.  No, a man commits crime because he finds himself in certain physical and social conditions, from which the evil plant of crime takes life and strength.  Thus we obtain the origin of that sad human figure which is the product of the interaction of those factors, an abnormal man, a man not adapted to the conditions of the social environment in which he is born, so that emigration becomes an ever more permanent phenomenon for the greater portion of men, for whom the accident of birth will less and less determine the course of their future life.  And the abnormal man who is below the minimum of adaptability to social life and bears the marks of organic degeneration, develops either a passive or an aggressive form of abnormality and becomes a criminal.

Among these abnormal human beings, two groups must be particularly distinguished.  Limiting our observations to those who are true aggressively antisocial abnormals, that is to say, who are not adapted to a certain social order and attack it by crimes, we must distinguish those who for egoistic or ferocious reasons attack society by atavistic forms of the struggle for existence by committing socalled common crimes in the shape of fraud or violence, thereby opposing or abolishing