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All through this book are scattered not only defects of method, but also actual errors in matters of fact.  The book is also marred by an immanent contradiction that runs all through it, in connection with the absolutely uncompromising attitude against socialism which the author aims to maintain, but which he is unable to keep up in the face of the irresistible tendency of the facts, as we shall see in the conclusion of this analysis.

In chapter IV, M. Garofalo contends that civilization would be menaced with destruction by the elevation to power of the popular classes.  M. Garofalo, who is of an old aristocratic family, declares that “the Third Estate, which should have substituted youthful energies for the feebleness and corruption of an effete and degenerate aristocracy, has shown magnified a hundred-fold the defects and corruption of the latter” (p. 206).  This is certainly not a correct historical judgment; for it is certain that the Third Estate, which with the French Revolution gained political ascendancy—­a political ascendancy made inevitable by its previously won economic ascendancy,—­gave in the course of the Nineteenth Century a new and powerful impulse to civilization.  And if to-day, after a century of undisputed domination, the bourgeoisie shows “multiplied a hundred-fold” the defects and the corruption of the aristocracy of the Eighteenth Century, this signifies simply that the Third Estate has reached the final phase of its parabola, so that the advent of a more developed social phase is becoming an imminent historical necessity.

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Another error in criminal psychology—­natural enough for idealists and metaphysicians, but which may well surprise us in an exact scientist—­is the influence upon human conduct which M. Garofalo attributes to the religious sentiment.  “Moral instruction has no meaning, or at least no efficacy, without a religious basis” (p. 267).  And from this erroneous psychological premise, he draws the conclusion that it is necessary to return to religious instruction in the schools, “selecting the masters from among men of mature age, fathers of families or ministers of religion” (p. 268).

In combating this conclusion, truly surprising in a scientist, it is useless to recall the teachings of the experience of former times in regard to the pretended moralizing influence of the priest upon the school; and it is also unnecessary to recall the statistics of criminal assaults committed by priests condemned to celibacy.  It is equally superfluous to add that at all events, in again turning the priest into a schoolmaster, it would be necessary to recommend to him never to recall the invectives of Jesus against the rich, the metaphor of the camel passing through the eye of a needle, or the still more violent invectives of the Fathers of the Church against private property; for long before Proudhon, Saint Jerome had said that “wealth is always the product of theft; if it was not committed by the present holder, it was by his ancestors,” and Saint Ambrose added that “Nature has established community [of goods]; from usurpation alone is private property born.”