But are idleness and vagrancy considered in themselves also offenses? Any man is harmful to his species, says Féré, when he does not collaborate, either materially or intellectually, in production. According to Dr. Colajanni, idleness and vagrancy, viewed from such a high social point of view, are really offenses. But then the idle rich are also guilty of these offenses. Finally, what are the causes of these crimes? Spencer, Féré, and Sergi say: the vagrants are the weak, the degenerate, the parasites of society. The question is this, then: do these phenomena find their origin inside or outside of the human organism? Romagnosi says that vagrancy and idleness ought to be punished only when they are not excusable. To make them inexcusable it would be necessary to procure employment for every man who was willing to work. Spencer, Sergi, and Garofalo, on the contrary, are of the opinion that these crimes are almost always to be imputed to the same persons. However, Spencer should not have forgotten that in his own country, aside from industrial crises, numerous occurrences have forced a great number of persons to become idlers and vagrants through no fault of their own, as for example, the Irish and Scotch farmers driven from their lands by the landlords. And Garofalo should have known that it is capitalism that has made the work of men superfluous by employing women and children, and that the cause does not rest with those who suffer from it; on the contrary, the cause of economic crises is not in their victims, but in the system that is in force. An examination of the causes of these two phenomena obliges us to distinguish between habitual and accidental, or forced, vagrancy. However—and this is too often forgotten—the latter transforms itself into the former, for the taste for work is, like morality, an acquired social product. This is why this quality is lost when one is long without work. One of the most important causes of the possible transformation of a worker into a vagrant is a long illness. Having lost the habit of work, and being enfeebled, a man will find great difficulty in going to work again. If he does not succeed he descends step by step until he comes finally to mendicity. But it is chiefly the economic transformations, inventions, overproduction, that must be called the “causa causarum” of the phenomena cited above. [239] Prostitution, which occupies so important a place in the etiology of crime, in almost every case finds its origin in poverty, in a bad education, in a corrupting environment, as is proved by the official investigations and the writings of specialists, like Parent-Duchatelet, Fiaux, Augagneur, and many others. [240]