inadequate, so far as the telluric and anthropological factors are
concerned. But it could surely be rapid, efficacious and prompt, so far
as the social factors influencing criminality are concerned.

We have now demonstrated that crime has its natural source in the
combined interaction of three classes of causes, the anthropological
(organic and psychological) factor, the telluric factor, and the social
factor. And by this last factor we must not only mean want, but any
other condition of administrative instability in political, moral, and
intellectual life. Every social condition which makes the life of man in
society insincere and imperfect is a social factor contributing towards
criminality. The economic factor is in evidence in our civilization
wherever the law of free competition, which is but a form of disguised
cannibalism, establishes the rule: _Your death is my life_. The
competition of laborers for a limited number of places is equivalent to
saying that those who secure a living do so at the expense of those who
do not. And this is a disguised form of cannibalism. While it does not
devour the competitor as primitive mankind did, it paralyzes him by
calumnies, recommendations, protection, money, which, secure the place
for the best bargainer and leave the most honest, talented, and
self-respecting to the pangs of starvation.

Moreover, the economic factor exerts its crime-breeding influence also
under the form of a superabundance of wealth. Indeed, in our present
society, which is in the downward stage of transition from glorious
bourgeois civilization, which constituted a golden page of human
history in the 19th century, wealth itself is a source of crime. For the
rich, who do not enjoy the advantage of manual or intellectual work,
suffer from the corruption of leisure and vice. Gambling throws them
into an unhealthy fever; the struggle and race for money poison their