In this fact, again, which confutes the common opinion that the sovereign remedy of crime is the greater rigour of punishment, we may fairly find a positive proof that the penal, legislative, and administrative systems hitherto adopted have missed their aim, which can be nothing else than the defence of society against criminals. Henceforth we must seek, through the study of <p 92>facts, a better direction for penal legislation as a function of society, so that, by the observation of psychological and sociological laws, it may tend, not to a violent and always tardy reaction against crime already evolved, but to the elimination or diversion of its natural factors. This fundamental conclusion of criminal statistics is so important that we must confirm it by adding to the statistical data the general laws of biology and sociology. This is the more necessary because my position as first stated has met with some criticism. In the first place, it is easily seen, when we compare the total result of crime with the varied character of its anthropological, physical, and social factors, that punishment can exert but a slight influence upon it. Punishment, in fact, by its special effect as a legal deterrent, acting as a psychological motive, will clearly be unable to neutralise the constant and hereditary action of climate, customs, increase of population, agricultural production, economic and political crises, which statistics invariably exhibit as the most potent factors of the growth or diminution of criminality. It is a natural law that forces cannot conflict or neutralise each other unless they are of the same kind. The fall of a body cannot be retarded, changed in direction or accelerated, save by a force homogeneous with that of gravity. So punishment, as a psychological motive, can only oppose the psychological factors of crime, and indeed only the occasional and moderately energetic factors; for it is <p 93>evident that it cannot, as a preliminary to its application, eliminate the organic hereditary factors which are revealed to us by criminal anthropology. Punishment, which has professed to be such a simple and powerful remedy against all the factors of crime, is therefore a panacea whose potency is far beneath its reputation.