ot
sometimes only as many as, say, 300 cases, the number committed in
England, which has nearly the same number of inhabitants as Italy; and
how it is that there are not sometimes 300,000 such cases in Italy
instead of 3,000?

It is useless to open any work of classical criminology for this
purpose, for you will not find an answer to these questions in than. No
one, from Beccaria to Carrara, has ever thought of this problem, and
they could not have asked it, considering their point of departure and
their method. In fact, the classic criminologists accept the phenomenon
of criminality as an accomplished fact. They analyze it from the point
of view of the technical jurist, without asking how this criminal fact
may have been produced, and why it repeats itself in greater or smaller
numbers from year to year, in every country. The theory of a free will,
which is their foundation, excludes the possibility of this scientific
question, for according to it the crime is the product of the fiat of
the human will. And if that is admitted as a fact, there is nothing left
to account for. The manslaughter was committed, because the criminal
wanted to commit it; and that is all there is to it. Once the theory of
a free will is accepted as a fact, the deed depends on the fiat, the
voluntary determination, of the criminal, and all is said.

But if, on the other hand, the positive school of criminology denies, on
the ground of researches in scientific physiological psychology, that
the human will is free and does not admit that one is a criminal because
he wants to be, but declares that a man commits this or that crime only
when he lives in definitely determined conditions of personality and
environment which induce him necessarily to act in a certain way, then
alone does the problem of the origin of criminality begin to be
submitted to a preliminary analysis, and then alone does criminal law
step out of the narrow and arid limits of technical jurisprudence and
become a true social and human science in the highest and noblest
meaning of the word. It is vain to insist with such stubbornness as that
of the classic school of criminology on juristic formulas by which the
distinction between illegal appropriation and theft, between fraud and
other forms of crime against property, and so forth, is determined, when
this method does not give to society one single word which would throw
light upon the reasons that make a man a criminal and upon