inistration, politics, and intelligence. Instead of
that, the legislators permit the microbes of criminality to develop
their pathogenic powers in society. When crimes become manifest, the
legislator knows no other remedy but imprisonment in order to punish an
evil which he should have prevented. Unfortunately this scientific
conviction is not yet rooted and potent in the minds of the legislators
of most of the civilized countries, because they represent on an
average the backward scientific convictions of one or two previous
generations. The legislator who sits in parliament today was the
university student of 30 years ago. With a few very rare exceptions he
is supplied only with knowledge of outgrown scientific research. It is a
historical law that the work of the legislator is always behind the
science of his time. But nevertheless the scientist has the urgent duty
to spread the conviction that hygiene is worth as much on the field of
civilization as it is in medicine for the public health.

This is the fundamental conviction at which the positive school arrives:
That which has happened in medicine will happen in criminology. The
great value of practical hygiene, especially of social hygiene, which is
greater than that of individual hygiene, has been recognized after the
marvelous scientific discoveries concerning the origin and primitive
causes of the most dangerous diseases. So long as Pasteur and his
disciples had not given to the world their discovery of the pathogenic
microbes of all infectious diseases, such as typhoid fever, cholera,
diphtheria, tuberculosis, etc, more or less absurd remedies were
demanded of the science of medicine. I remember, for instance, that I
was compelled in my youth, during an epidemic of cholera, to stay in a
closed room, in which fumigation was carried on with substances
irritating the bronchial tubes and lungs without killing the cholera
microbes, as was proved later on. It was not until the real causes of
those infectious diseases were discovered, that efficient remedies could
be employed against them. An aqueduct given to a center of population
like Naples is a better protection against cholera than drugs, even
after the disease has taken root in the midst of the people of Naples.
This is the modern lesson which we wish to teach in the field of
criminology, a field which will always retain its repressive functions
as an exceptional and ultimate refuge, because we do not believe th