Studying elsewhere the influence of the religious sentiment on criminality[92], I have shown by positive documentary evidence, that religious beliefs, efficacious for individuals already endowed with a normal social sense, since they add to the sanction of the moral conscience (which, however, would suffice by itself) the sanctions of the life beyond the tomb—"religion is the guarantor of justice"[93]—are, nevertheless, wholly ineffective, when the social sense, on account of some physio-psychical anomaly, is atrophied or non-existent. So that religious belief, considered as a regulator of social conduct, is at once superfluous for honorable people and altogether ineffective for those who are not honorable, if indeed it is not capable of increasing the propensity to evil by developing religious fanaticism or giving rise to the hope of pardon in the confessional or of absolution in articulo mortis, etc.
It is possible to understand—at least as an expedient as utilitarian as it is highly hypocritical—the argument of those who, atheists so far as they themselves are concerned, still wish to preserve religious beliefs for the people, because they exercise a depressing influence and prevent all energetic agitation for human rights and enjoyments here below. The conception of God as a Policeman is only one among many illusions.
Besides these errors of fact in the biological and psychological sciences, M. Garofalo also misstates the socialist doctrines, following the example of the opponents of the new school of criminology, who found it easier to refute the doctrines they attributed to us than to shake the doctrines we defended.
On page 14, M. Garofalo begins by stating, "the true tendency of the party known as the Workingmen's Party, is to gain power, not in the interest of all, but in order to expropriate the dominant class and to step into their shoes. They do not disguise this purpose in their programmes." This statement is found again on page 210, etc.
Now, it suffices to have read the programme of the socialist party, from the Manifesto of Marx and Engels down to the propagandist publications, to know, on the contrary, that contemporary socialism wishes, and declares its wish, to accomplish the general suppression of all social divisions into classes by suppressing the division of the social patrimony of production, and, therefore, proclaims itself resolved to achieve the prosperity of all, and not only—as some victims of myopia continue to believe—that of a Fourth Estate, which would simply have to follow the example of the decaying Third Estate.
Starting from this fundamental datum of socialism, that every individual, unless he be a child, sick or an invalid, must work, in order to live, at one sort or another of useful labor, it follows as an inevitable consequence that, in a society organized on this principle, all class antagonism will become impossible; for this antagonism exists only when society contains a great majority who work, in order to live in discomfort, and a small minority who live well, without working.
This initial error naturally dominates the entire book. Thus, for instance, the third chapter is devoted to proving that "the social revolution planned for by the new socialists, will be the destruction of all moral order in society, because it is without an ideal to serve it as a luminous standard" (p. 159).
Let us disregard, my dear Baron, the famous "moral order" of that society which enriches and honors the well-dressed wholesale thieves of the great and little Panamas, the banks and railways, and condemns to imprisonment children and women who steal dry wood or grass in the fields which formerly belonged to the commune.
But to say that socialism is without an ideal, when even its opponents concede to it this immense superiority in potential strength over the sordid skepticism of the present world, viz., its ardent faith in a higher social justice for all, a faith that makes strikingly clear its resemblance to the regenerating Christianity of primitive times (very different from that "fatty degeneration" of Christianity, called Catholicism), to say this is truly, for a scientist, to blindly rebel against the most obvious facts of daily life.