we have a city in which some hundred thousand people rise every
morning and do not know how to get a living, who have no fixed
occupation, because there is not enough industrial development to reach
that methodical application of labor which lifted humanity out of the
prehistoric forests. Truly, the human race progresses by two uplifting
energies: War and labor.

In primitive and savage society, when the human personality did not know
the check of social discipline, a military discipline held the members
of the tribe together. But war, while useful in primitive society, loses
its usefulness more and more, because it carries within itself the
cancer that paralyzes it.

While war compels collective groups to submit to the co-ordinating
discipline of human activity, it also decreases the respect for human
life. The soldier who kills his fellow man of a neighboring nation by a
stroke of his sword will easily lose the respect for the life of
members of his own social group. Then the second educational energy
interferes, the energy of labor, which makes itself felt at the decisive
moment of prehistoric development, when the human race passes from a
pastoral, hunting, and nomadic life Into an agriculture and settled
life. This is the historic stage, in which the collective ownership of
land and instruments of production is displaced by communal property,
family property, and finally individual property. During these stages,
humanity passes from individual and isolated labor in collective,
associated, co-ordinated labor. The remains of the neolithic epoch show
us the progress of the first workshops, in which our ancestors gathered
and fashioned their primitive tools and arms. They give us an idea of
associated and common labor, which then becomes the great uplifting
energy, because, unlike war, it does not carry within itself a disdain
or violation of the rights of others. Labor is the sole perennial energy
of mankind which leads to social perfection. But if you have 100,000
persons in a city like Naples who do not enjoy the certainty and
discipline of employment at methodical and common labor, you need not
wonder that the uncertainty of daily life, an illfed stomach, and an
anemic brain, result in the atrophy of all moral sentiment, and that the
evil plant of the Camorra spreads out over everything. The processes in
the law courts may attract the fleeting attention of public opinion, of
legislation, of government, to the dise