conditions in which their fellow beings may live.  This is the atavistic type of criminals which represents an involutionary, or retrogressive, form of abnormality, due to an arrested development or an atavistic reversion to a savage and primitive type.  These constitute the majority in the world of criminals and must be distinguished from the minority, who are evolutionary, or progressive, abnormals, that may also commit crime in a violent form, but must not be confounded with the others, because they do not act from egoistic motives, but rebel from altruistic motives against the injustice of the present order.  These altruistic criminals feel the sufferings and horrors due to the injustice surrounding them and may go so far as to commit murder, which must always be condemned, but which must not be confounded with atavistic or egoistic murder.  Recourse to personal violence is always objectionable from the point of view of higher manhood, which desires that human life should always be held in respect.  But the reasons for such a crime are different, being egoistic in the one, and altruistic in the other case.  The evolutionary abnormal is often an instrument of human progress, not in the form of criminality, but in that of intellectual and moral rebellion against conditions which are sanctioned by laws that frequently punish such an evolutionary rebellion harder than atavistic crime, as they do in Russia, where capital punishment has been abolished for common crimes, but retained for political violations of the law!  We are living in an epoch of transition from the old to the new, and contemporaneous humanity has an uneasy moral conscience in this critical time.  The ruling classes are losing their clearness of vision, so that they promise monuments to those political murderers who promoted their own historical victories, but would condemn like any common criminal him who now devotes his soul to a revolutionary ideal, would throw into prison the pioneer of new human ideals, just as Russia is excommunicating the rebel Tolstoi.  I mention Leo Tolstoi advisedly for the purpose of giving a precise illustration of my heterodox thought in reference to this question.  We are opposed to any form of personal violence (with the sole exception of self-defense), we cannot approve of any form of personal assault, no matter what may be its motive.  Therefore we cannot have words of praise or excuse for political murder, though it may be inspired by altruistic motives.  We can demand that the legislator should distinguish between the psychological sources of these two forms of murder, the egoistic and the altruistic form.  But we condemn them both, because they are inhuman forms of violence.  Ideas do not make victorious headway by force of arms.  Ideas must be combatted by ideas, and it is only by the propaganda of the idea that we can prepare humanity for its future.  Violence is always a means of preventing the sincere and fruitful diffusion of an idea.  We do not say this merely for the abnormals of the lower classes.  We refer with scientific serenity also to the upper classes, who would suppress by violence every manifestation of revolt against the social iniquities, every affirmation of faith in a better future.