ere movable property is more developed, the crime of theft assumes a
greater intensity, while crimes due to conditions of the blood are
decreasing on account of the lesser poverty and the resulting lesser
degeneration of the people. In the south, on the other hand, crimes
against property are less frequent and crimes of blood more frequent.
Still there also are in southern Italy certain cases where criminality
of the blood is less frequent, and you cannot explain this in any other
way than by the influence of racial character. If you take a
geographical map of manslaughter in Italy, you will see that from the
minimum, from Lombardy, Piedmont, and Venice, the intensity increases
until it reaches its maximum in the insular and peninsular extreme of
the south. But even there you will find certain cases in which
manslaughter shows a lesser intensity.

For instance, the province of Benevent is surrounded by other provinces
which show a maximum of crimes due to conditions of blood, while it
registers a smaller number. Naples, again, shows a considerably smaller
number of such cases than the provinces surrounding it, but it has a
greater number of unpremeditated cases of manslaughter. Messina, Catania
and Syracuse have a remarkably smaller number of blood crimes than
Trapani, Girgenti and Palermo. It has been attempted to claim that this
difference in criminality is due to social condition's, because the
agricultural conditions in eastern Sicily are less degrading than those
of Girgenti and Trapani, where the sulphur mines compel the miners to
live miserably. But we should like to ask the following question in
opposition to this idea: Why and in what respect are the agricultural
conditions in some provinces better than in others? This condition is
merely itself a result, not a cause of the first degree.

Since the theory of historical materialism, which I prefer to call
economic determinism, has demonstrated that political, moral and
intellectual phenomena are reactions on the economic conditions of any
time and place, the attempt has been made to interpret this theory very
narrowly and to pretend that the economic condition of a nation is a
primary cause and not determined by any other. For my part, ever since I
have demonstrated the perfect accord between the Marxian and the
Darwinian theories, I have said: Very well, the economic conditions of a
nation explain its political, moral, intellectual conditions, but the
economic