have been spilled in the attempt to find the distinguishing elements of
these two degrees of crime. And finally, when the German legislator
concluded to make no distinction between incompleted and attempted crime
and to recognize only the completed crime in his code of 1871, we
witnessed the spectacle of Carrara praising that legislator for leaving
that subtile distinction out of his code. A strange conclusion on the
part of a science, which cudgels its brains for a century to find the
marks of distinction between attempted and incompleted crime, and then
praises the legislator for ignoring it. And another classic jurist,
Buccellati, proposed to do away with the theory of attempted crime by
simply defining it as a crime by itself, or as--a violation of police
laws! A science which comes to such conclusions is a science which moves
in metaphysical abstractions, and we shall see that all these finespun
questions which abound in classical science lose all practical value
before the necessity of saving society from the plague of crime.

The method which we, on the other hand, have inaugurated is the
following: Before we study crime from the point of view of a juristic
phenomenon, we must study the causes to which the annual recurrence of
crimes in all countries is due. These are natural causes, which I have
classified under the three heads of anthropological, telluric and
social. Every crime, from the smallest to the most atrocious, is the
result of the interaction of these three causes, the anthropological
condition of the criminal, the telluric environment in which he is
living, and the social environment in which he is born, living and
operating. It is a vain beginning to separate the meshes of this net of
criminality. There are still those who would maintain the one-sided
standpoint that the origin of crime may be traced to only one of these
elements, for instance, to the social element alone. So far as I am
concerned, I have combatted this opinion from the very inauguration of