ssarily adapt itself to
the modified social conditions.

Certainly, human nature will not change in its fundamental tendencies;
and, as an illustration, man like the animals will always shun suffering
and strive after pleasure, since the former is a diminution and the
latter an augmentation of life; but this is not inconsistent with the
fact that the application and direction of these biological tendencies
can and must change with the changes in the environment. So that I have
been able elsewhere to demonstrate that individual egoism will, indeed,
always exist, but it will act in a profoundly different fashion, in a
society whose conscious goal will be true human solidarity, from the way
in which it acts in the individualist and morally anarchical world of
to-day, a world in which every man, by the working of what is called
"free competition," is forced to follow the impulses of his anti-social
egoism, that is to say, to be in conflict, and not in harmony, with the
wants and the tendencies of the other members of society.

But the repetition of worn-out commonplaces reaches its climax when M.
Garofalo--surely, through inattention--writes these marvelous lines:

"Apparently, many young men of aristocratic families do not work. It is
nevertheless more correct to say that they do not do any productive
labor for themselves, but they work just the same (!!), and this for the
benefit of others!

"In fact, these gentlemen 'of leisure' are generally devoted to
sport--hunting, yachting, horseback riding, fencing--or to travel, or to
_dilettantisme_ in the arts, and their activity, unproductive for
themselves, provides an immense number of persons with profitable
occupations" (page 183).

One day, when I was studying the prisoners in a jail, one of them said
to me: Such an outcry is made against the criminals because they do not
work; but if we did not exist, "an immense number of persons"--jailers,
policemen, judges and lawyers--would be without a "profitable
occupation!"

* * * * *

After having noted these _specimens_ of unscientific carelessness, and
before entering upon the examination of the few scientific arguments
developed by M. Garofalo, it will be well, to aid us in forming a
general judgment on his book, to show how far he has forgotten the most
elementary rules of the scientific method.

And it will be useful also to add a few examples of mistakes in regard
to facts bearing ei