However there are some things to be noted. According to the author there are two sources of criminality, the one economic, the other intellectual. I consider that this distinction is not correct. Every crime has an intellectual source, in this sense, that it is an act conceived by the intellect. It is impossible, therefore, to see beside this source an economic cause. But the intellect considered by itself is empty; it is from the environment that it must draw the material which it will transform into ideas. Consequently the question becomes this: how far is the economic environment the cause of the formation of criminal thoughts. Intellect and economic conditions do not stand side by side but the one follows upon the other. It is only making use of a commonplace to say that crime has an intellectual source; that explains nothing.
In reading the first pages of the report one expects, after the historical exposition which says that every economic phase has its own form of criminality, to find an exposition of the present economic system, and an inquiry into how far the criminality of our own day is bound up with it. This would have been, I think, most important, and would have advanced the subject. The most serious criticism that I have to make is that nothing of the kind is attempted. What follows is only a series of isolated remarks, which are correct only in part, and in which the whole question is reduced to a matter of economic crises, although the title speaks of economic conditions.
It is incorrect to say that the statisticians have not investigated the influence of economic crises, as the second chapter of this work proves. In it I have analyzed the works of the different authors who have especially treated of this subject. Finally, I would call attention to the fact that he furnishes no proof of his assertion that the class struggle takes its rise in times of crisis—and would find it difficult to do so.
What Professor Tarde means in speaking of “the advancement of manufacturing and its reorganization upon a vaster and better conceived plan”, is not clear. But it is certain that the final observation that there must be “an individual organization of wants”, is purely Utopian. For it is one of the characteristic phenomena of our present society that it has strongly excited the cupidity of men, and that this will disappear only when its cause has ceased to exist.
All Professor Tarde’s works upon criminality convince us of the [[161]]great knowledge of their author. The report of which I have been speaking contains also ideas that are often very original, but this does not prevent the necessity of confessing that it does not contribute much to the solution of the problem that it treats.—
III.
A. Corre.
In the third book of his “Crime et suicide” the author treats of the influence of economic conditions upon criminality, beginning with “labor, wages, and needs.”
