Civilization is the most fruitful and most beautiful development of
human energies, but it contains also an infectious _virus_ of tremendous
power. Beside the splendor of its artistic, scientific and industrial
achievements, it accumulates gangrenous products, idleness, poverty,
misery, insanity, crime and physical suicide and moral suicide, _i. e._
servility.

Pessimism--that sad symptom of a life without ideals and, in part, the
effect of the exhaustion or even of the degeneration of the nervous
system--glorifies the final annihilation of all life and sensation as
the only mode of escaping from or triumphing over pain and suffering.

We have faith, on the contrary, in the eternal _virtus medicatrix
naturae_ (healing power of Nature), and socialism is precisely that
breath of a new and better life which will free humanity--after some
access of fever perhaps--from the noxious products of the present phase
of civilization, and which, in a more advanced phase, will give a new
power and opportunity of expansion to all the healthy and fruitful
energies of all human beings.

ENRICO FERRI.

Rome, June, 1894.


FOOTNOTE:

[1] The word in the original means a mariner's compass.--_Tr._