However, on the strength of the statements of an old police officer, Joly thinks he can draw the conclusion that poverty enters only to a small extent into the etiology of crime. Nevertheless the established fact that a rise in the price of grain is associated with an increase of criminality, contradicts this. But according to Joly the contradiction is only apparent. “Famines are exceptional; theft is constant and while famines are always decreasing, theft is always increasing. Suppose that in ordinary years people did not steal or stole very little; the difficult moments would find them more patient, more resolute to have recourse to legal and permissible means; we should not see them so prompt to extricate themselves from their difficulties by simply taking the property of others. But what resistance can we count on from those who have long had the habit of stealing from fancy, cupidity, or a desire to gormandize? What resistance can be hoped for, especially when the habit has begun in youth? Now, we have seen that a third of the thefts are committed by minor children.” [213] The weakness of the influence of economic conditions upon criminality is, according to Joly, further proved by the fact that times of prosperity are not accompanied by a decrease in the number but by a change in the kind of crime committed (as Prins and Garofalo have shown). Cheap wine makes most crimes against persons increase. But the low price of grain has the same effect, since the working-man, when his condition has improved even a little, spends his additional earnings in all kinds of amusements, which, in their turn, may be the source of crime. This is proved, for example, by the fact that in Marseilles suicides are most numerous on Sunday and Monday, and fewest on Friday and Saturday, a fact explained by the pay-days of the working people. This is also applicable to crimes against persons. To prove his thesis the author reminds us of the fact that domestics, although not subject to privations, furnish a large percentage of the thefts; that the percentage of thefts committed by unmarried persons continually increases; and finally, that the investigation (of 107 cases tried in 10 years before the assizes at Rheims), made by a magistrate (Ch. Vuébat), has proved that economic factors have little importance for criminality, and moral factors much. “To sum up, it is not the increase of poverty that is the cause of the increase of crime; it is not property in general that leads to crime against property. This is not saying that poverty, and innocent poverty, does not exist, nor that it is not a bad counselor, nor that it is not the duty of the upper classes and of the government to concern themselves with the lot of the poor. It does mean that a man is less led into evil-doing by the faults of others or by the fault of destiny than by his personal faults.” [214]