Imitation, says the author, is governed by two laws, namely, that men imitate one another more the more closely they come together, and that imitation of the high by the low is what most often takes place (that the customs of the nobility are imitated by the people, etc.). If we test these rules in their application to crime, we shall find that they hold good there also. The author gives the following examples, among others, in support of this: “Vagrancy, under its thousand actual forms, is an offense essentially plebeian; but if we go back into the past it will not be difficult to connect our tramps and street singers with the noble pilgrims and minstrels of the Middle Ages. Poaching, another nursery of criminals, which in the past, together with smuggling, has played a part comparable with vagrancy in the present, is still more directly connected with the life of the lord of the manor.” [142] “Arson, a crime of the lowest classes today, was once the prerogative of the feudal nobility. Was not the Margrave of Brandenburg heard to boast one day that he had burned in his life 170 villages? Counterfeiting takes refuge at present in mountain caverns, or subcellars in the city, but we know that coining was long a royal monopoly. “Finally, theft, so degrading in our day, has had a brilliant past. Montaigne tells us, without being very indignant at it, that many young gentlemen of his acquaintance, whose fathers did not give them enough money, procured more by stealing.” [143] There was a time, then, when criminality extended itself from the higher classes to the lower; at present new forms of crime take their rise in the great cities and spread out into the country. The increase of crime in the cities is very considerable, and it is very probable that, in accordance with the law cited, criminality will at length increase in the country as greatly. It is especially the crimes of assassination, sexual crimes against minors, abortion, and infanticide, that have increased. So the opinion of several Italian criminologists, “that crimes against persons decrease where crimes against property increase, and vice versa”, is wrong, according to Professor Tarde, since both kinds of crime increase in the great cities. “To sum up, the prolonged action of the great cities upon criminality is manifest, it seems to us, in the gradual substitution, not exactly of trickery for violence, but of covetous, crafty, and voluptuous violence, for vindictive and brutal violence.” [144] Nevertheless, civilization improves men, and the growing criminality is in opposition to the greater and greater increase of civilization. This contradiction is explained by the author by means of another law of imitation; the law of insertion, i.e. the alternate passage from fashion to custom.