Moribund Society and Anarchy

logical, we promulgate the opposite idea. We no longer see actions as good or bad, except as they are agreeable or disagreeable to us, and in consequence act accordingly. We approve or become enthusiastic, defend or attack, according to the benefit or injury received by our interests, our passions, and our conceptions of the ideal. The common need of solidarity which leads people subjected to the same attacks to unite for their defense is to us the guarantee of a future social order less troubled than our own. We do not judge, but work and struggle; and we believe that universal harmony will result from the free action of all men, when once the suppression of private property no longer permits a handful of persons to enslave their fellows. Hence we cannot admit that, six weeks or six years after an act has been committed, a group of persons supported by armed force should assemble to judge, in the name of some entity or other, and reward or punish the author of the act. That is hypocrisy and cowardice. You reproach a man with having killed, and to teach him that he was wrong you have him killed by the executioner, society’s hired assassin! The executioner and you have not even the excuse of having risked your own necks, since you proceed under cover of an armed force which protects you. We are at war with the ruling caste: recognize, gentlemen of the magistracy, that you are its retainers, and let us alone with your big words and fine phrases. Maintain the privileges whose care is confided to you, use the force which ignorance concedes to you, but leave justice in peace; she has nothing to do with you!

That you might be able to judge appreciatively of the ignominy of your role in beating down others, we would like, O judges, that it might happen to you that, being innocent, you should fall into the clutches of your fellows, to be judged in your turn. In such a situation you might learn what anguish and terror they have had to pass through who have filed before your bar, and whom you have tortured, you, magistrates, as the cat tortures the mouse. With the floods of eloquence from the prosecuting attorney pleading against you rolling about your ears, you might see passing before your eyes the specters of those unfortunates that, during your career, you have immolated upon the altar of social vengeance; you might ask yourselves then, with terror, if they also were not innocent. O yes, we would heartily wish that there might be one among you falsely accused, who should go through the terrors of those that come before your bar. For if, his innocence being one day admitted, he were reinstated in his functions, it is strongly to be presumed that he would re-enter his place in the tribunal only to tear his robe and apologize for his criminal life as magistrate, judging haphazard and trafficking in human lives.

IX

The Right to Punish and the Savants

Science, today, admits without dispute that man is the sport of a multitude of forces to whose play he is subjected, and that free will does not exist. Environment, heredity, education, climatic and atmospheric influences, act upon man in turn, now clashing with each other, now combining, but exercising an undeniable influence upon his brain, and whirling him about under their impact as the teetotum spins under the gyratory motion of the fingers of the player who sets it agoing. According to his heredity, his education and environment in which he lives, the individual will be more or less docile to the stimulus of certain forces, more or less refractory to certain others; but it is none the less sure that his personality is but the product of these forces. Having stated these facts, a number of savants, whose acknowledged chief is C. Lombroso, tried to establish a criminal type. They applied themselves to a search for anomalies that should characterize this type, which they claim to have discovered; and after having wrangled a good deal over the aforesaid type, created by themselves, they decide for energetic repression, life imprisonment, etc.⁠—Man acts under the influence of causes external to himself; hence he is not responsible for his acts. The savants recognize this, and therefore decide for⁠—repression!

Hereafter we shall have occasion to explain this contradiction. For the present let us examine the principal anomalies designated by the criminologists as the characteristic of criminality:

• Old wounds;

• Anomalies of the skin;

• Anomalies of the ears and nose;

• Tattooing.

There are many others which seem to us to have no more relation to a person’s mentality than the foregoing, but our ignorance of anatomy does not permit us to discuss them thoroughly. Let us rest content with those we have just enumerated. Wounds:⁠—It is quite evident that a person who bears the marks of old wounds may be something else than a regular criminal, especially if he received those wounds in an accident, while at work, or in risking his life to save one of his fellows. Until now we had believed that criminality consisted rather in giving blows than receiving them; it appears that the contrary is the case for science⁠—that it is he who gets wounded! Brothers, let us bow! As to anomalies of the nose and ears, we have sought in vain for what relation they could have to the brain; we have not found it. But there is better to follow. Lombroso concedes that many cases which he instances as anomalies are frequently found among those whom he calls honest people. These, then, are anomalies tending to become generalities! Till now we had been inclined to believe that an anomaly was a case of departure from the generality. Lombroso’s science tends to prove the contrary. Sad inconsequence, which proves, more than anything else, that men who have gotten astride a hobbyhorse, shut themselves in one corner of science, finish by