But it must be remarked that if the death of these 467 miners is not directly the voluntary work of any one, it is indirectly a result of individual capitalism, which, to swell its revenues, reduces expenses to the lowest possible point, does not curtail the hours of labor, and does not take all the preventive measures indicated by science and sometimes even enjoined by law, which is in such cases not respected, for the justice of every country is as flexible to accommodate the interests of the ruling class as it is rigid when applied against the interests of the working-class.

If the mines were collectively owned, it is certain the owners would be less stingy about taking all the technical preventive precautions (electric lighting, for instance), which would diminish the number of these frightful catastrophes which infinitely increase the anonymous multitude of the martyrs of toil and which do not even trouble the digestion of the share-holders in mining companies.

That is what the individualist regime gives us; all this will be transformed by the socialist regime.

[73] RIENZI, l’Anarchisme; DEVILLE, l’Anarchisme.

[74] A. ROSSI, l’Agitazione in Sicilia, Milan, 1894.  COLAJANNI, In Sicilia, Rome, 1894.

[75] The camorre were tyrannical secret societies that were formerly prevalent and powerful in Italy.—­Translator.

[76] I must recognize that one of the recent historians of socialism, M. l’Abbe Winterer—­more candid and honorable than more than one jesuitical journalist—­distinguishes always, in each country, the socialist movement from the anarchist movement.

WINTERER, le Socialisme contemporain, Paris, 1894, 2nd edition.

PART THIRD.

SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM.

XIII.

THE STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY.

One of the strangest facts in the history of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century is that, though the profound scientific revolution caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution has reinvigorated with new youth all the physical, biological and even psychological sciences, when it reached the domain of the social sciences, it only superficially rippled the tranquil and orthodox surface of the lake of that social science par excellence, political economy.

It has led, it is true, through the initiative of Auguste Comte—­whose name has been somewhat obscured by those of Darwin and Spencer, but who was certainly one of the greatest and most prolific geniuses of our age—­to the creation of a new science, Sociology, which should be, together with the natural history of human societies, the crowning glory of the new scientific edifice erected by the experimental method.

I do not deny that sociology, in the department of purely descriptive anatomy of the social organism, has made great and fruitful new contributions to contemporary science, even developing into some specialized branches of sociology, of which criminal sociology, thanks to the labors of the Italian school, has become one of the most important results.