To prove his thesis the author reminds us of the fact that domestics, although not subject to privations, furnish a large percentage of the thefts; that the percentage of thefts committed by unmarried persons continually increases; and finally, that the investigation (of 107 cases tried in 10 years before the assizes at Rheims), made by a magistrate (Ch. Vuébat), has proved that economic factors have little importance for criminality, and moral factors much. “To sum up, it is not the increase of poverty that is the cause of the increase of crime; it is not property in general that leads to crime against property. This is not saying that poverty, and innocent poverty, does not exist, nor that it is not a bad counselor, nor that it is not the duty of the upper classes and of the government to concern themselves with the lot of the poor. It does mean that a man is less led into evil-doing by the faults of others or by the fault of destiny than by his personal faults.”[7]
—If one considers the study of the question by Joly from a critical point of view, the thing that most strikes the attention is this; that he puts economic causes by the side of the moral causes of criminality. As I have already more than once remarked, this is not sound. Every crime finds its origin in moral causes, or better, in the lack of moral ideas dominant at a certain period. But one of the principal questions to be answered is this; how far do these moral ideas find their origin in definite economic conditions? Joly, being a spiritualist, has not succeeded in formulating this problem well, still less in solving it.
His entire treatment of the relation between criminality and economic conditions is characterized by a striking narrowness. He speaks of poverty and wealth as if they were the most natural things in the world, and had no need to be explained. Then he makes a distinction between voluntary and involuntary poverty, and excludes the former from the discussion as having nothing to do with the problem in question. This manner of reasoning has rather the air of a penitential sermon than of a scientific investigation. “Voluntary poverty”[8] [[203]]is a contradiction in terms. For a man tries as far as possible to spare himself suffering and to gain happiness. There can never be any such thing then as voluntary poverty.
Though his terms are unhappily chosen, Joly only wishes to point out that poverty may originate in circumstances or in the person himself. But in treating this problem he should not have been silent on a very important, and very difficult point, namely how far these individual causes of poverty are based upon the present economic system.
If the question treated by Joly is incomplete, what he says neither has any great value, nor does it prove at all his statement that the influence of economic conditions is small. He gives but a few pages to the very difficult question of whether the standard of living of the working class has been raised. He brings out the universally observed fact that the wants of all classes have increased, but he seems not to have noted that this is intimately bound up with the present mode of production. He cites the testimony of an old police officer, and the investigations of a magistrate (investigations, it may be said in passing, that reached the colossal number of 107 cases) in order to prove that most crimes are not committed as a consequence of immediate privations—as if this were enough to solve the question of how far economic conditions enter into the causes of crime.—[9]
II.
L. Proal.[10]
In his ninth chapter, entitled “Le crime et la misère,” this author gives some pages to our subject. It is incontestable, according to him, that poverty exerts an influence upon criminality. The number of crimes increases in the years of poor crops, or when there is a lack of work owing to industrial or agricultural crises. Thus, criminality reached high figures in 1840, 1847, and 1854, when the price of grain was high.