Corollary. Poverty alone causes many moral situations from which crime must logically result. The majority of criminals are in fact recruited among the less privileged classes.
But the bourgeoisie is not happy simply because the proletariat is unhappy. The cause of the unhappiness of both is in the present economic conditions, by which the great majority of the population vegetate in the blackest misery, while the others are immersed in idle luxury. There is only one remedy for this injustice; it is to divide the total product of labor among the workers, and not among the capitalists.
III.
N. Colajanni.
The whole of the first volume and the first chapters of the second volume of “La sociologia criminale”[7] contain a criticism of the theses of the Italian school. The author denies the correctness of these, since he believes that we must consider the anthropological and physical causes as having little or no importance. This he demonstrates in detail. In his last chapters Dr. Colajanni treats of social and economic factors.
While admitting that economic conditions are of the highest importance in the development of the whole social life, and consequently in the matter of criminality, the author does not agree with Marx and Loria, who consider every social occurrence, whether political, or religious, or æsthetic, or moral, as the unique and direct product of an economic phenomenon.[8] [[221]]
According to the author, this assertion is carried too far, since the feelings and passions of superior people, who do not think of material profits, influence the masses at certain moments.
A great number of philosophers, moralists, poets, statisticians, and economists have seen in economic conditions the “causa causarum” of morality, and consequently also of crime. Pietro Ellero, among others, says very decisively: “From private property are derived all crimes, or almost all. Property engenders cupidity and haughtiness on the one side and depravity on the other, even when it does not produce the perfect tyranny of the one class and the degradation of the other. It is the cause of most of the evil passions, faults, and crimes that are committed, of the troubles, anxieties, sadness, and rancor from which both rich and poor suffer alike. The immoral influence of property is continued afterwards, and that terribly, in the present organization of the family, constructed, as it is, almost always upon the basis of calculation!”[9]
It is incontestable that economic conditions have a direct influence upon the origin of crime. The lack of the means of satisfying the numerous wants of a man is already a goad to incite him to procure these means in any way whatever, honest or dishonest. And it is the dishonest way that one will choose by preference when society makes it difficult or impossible to act otherwise. A London pickpocket gets $1500 a year on the average; on the other hand, the misery of those who wish to earn their living honestly is indescribable. Further, the honest man’s chance of being killed or becoming incapable of working is greater than the thief’s chance of being punished. Honest work results in fewer advantages and more dangers than dishonest work.