The same conclusions are valid regarding crime.  If we suppress poverty and the shocking inequality of economic conditions, hunger, acute and chronic, will no longer serve as a stimulus to crime.  Better nourishment will bring about a physical and moral improvement.  The abuses of power and of wealth will disappear, and there will be a considerable diminution in the number of crimes due to circumstances (crimes d’occasion), crimes caused principally by the social environment.  But there are some crimes which will not disappear, such as revolting crimes against decency due to a pathological perversion of the sexual instinct, homicides induced by epilepsy, thefts which result from a psycho-pathological degeneration, etc.

For the same reasons popular education will be more widely diffused, talents of every kind will be able to develop and manifest themselves freely; but this will not cause the disappearance of idiocy and imbecility due to hereditary pathological conditions.  Nevertheless it will be possible for different causes to have a preventive and mitigating influence on the various forms of congenital degeneration (ordinary diseases, criminality, insanity and nervous disorders).  Among these preventive influences may be:  a better economic and social organization, the prudential counsels, constantly growing in efficacy given by experimental biology, and less and less frequent procreation, by means of voluntary abstention, in cases of hereditary disease.

To conclude we will say that, even under the socialist regime—­although they will be infinitely fewer—­there will always be some who will be vanquished in the struggle for existence—­these will be the victims of weakness, of disease, of dissipation, of nervous disorders, of suicide.  We may then affirm that socialism does not deny the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence.  Socialism will, however, have this indisputable advantage—­the epidemic or endemic forms of human degeneracy will be entirely suppressed by the elimination of their principal cause—­the physical poverty and (its necessary consequence) the mental suffering of the majority.

Then the struggle for existence, while remaining always the driving power of the life of society, will assume forms less and less brutal and more and more humane.  It will become an intellectual struggle.  Its ideal of physiological and intellectual progress will constantly grow in grandeur and sublimity when this progressive idealization of the ideal shall be made possible by the guarantee to every one of daily bread for the body and the mind.

The law of the “struggle for life” must not cause us to forget another law of natural and social Darwinian evolution.  It is true many socialists have given to this latter law an excessive and exclusive importance, just as some individuals have entirely neglected it.  I refer to the law of solidarity which knits together all the living beings of one and the same species—­for instance animals who live gregariously in consequence of the abundance of the supply of their common food (herbivorous animals)—­or even of different species.  When species thus mutually aid each other to live they are called by naturalists symbiotic species, and instead of the struggle for life we have co-operation for life.