I have taken great pains neither to deride human actions, nor to deplore them, nor to detest them, but to understand them. —Spinoza. INTRODUCTION. In systematizing the literature of my subject I have pursued the following method: I begin with some significant extracts from authors who wrote before the birth of modern criminal science. After these I take up the statisticians, that is to say, those who, without belonging to any special school of criminologists, have treated the subject principally by the aid of statistics. Next I give an exposition of the school which insists especially upon the individual factors in crime, and ascribes only a secondary place to economic factors (the Italian school); following this I treat of the school which considers the rôle played by environment as very important (the French school); and afterwards that of the bio-sociological doctrine which forms the synthesis of the two schools. Then follow the “spiritualists”, that is to say the religious authors who have been more or less influenced by modern criminal science; and finally, the authors who belong to the “terza scuola”, and the socialists who consider the influence of economic conditions as being very important or even decisive. The authors coming under the same heading have been treated in chronological order. Like every classification this is more or less arbitrary. Several authors might have been placed under two different headings. We may add that as time goes on the differences between the Italian and French schools are becoming less and less marked, so that their opinions and those of the bio-sociologists no longer show any great divergences as far as our subject is concerned. PART ONE. CRITICAL EXPOSITION OF THE LITERATURE DEALING WITH THE RELATION BETWEEN CRIMINALITY AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS. CHAPTER I. THE PRECURSORS. AUTHORS WHO TREATED THE SUBJECT BEFORE THE BIRTH OF MODERN CRIMINAL SCIENCE. I. THOMAS MORE. [2] In the first part of his “Utopia” More severely criticises the economic conditions of his time in England, and adds some observations upon the criminality of that period. Raphael Hythloday, whom More makes the speaker in his work, and through whom he expresses his own opinions, says: “It chanced on a certain day, when I sat at the Cardinal’s table, there was also a certain lay man cunning in the laws of your realm. Who, I cannot tell whereof taking occasion, began diligently and earnestly to praise that strait and rigorous justice, which at that time was there executed upon felons, who, as he said, were for the most part twenty hanged together upon one gallows. And, seeing so few escaped punishment, he said he could not choose but greatly wonder and marvel, how and by what evil luck it should so come to pass, that thieves nevertheless were in every place so rife and so rank.