"In fact, these gentlemen 'of leisure' are generally devoted to sport--hunting, yachting, horseback riding, fencing--or to travel, or to _dilettantisme_ in the arts, and their activity, unproductive for themselves, provides an immense number of persons with profitable occupations" (page 183). One day, when I was studying the prisoners in a jail, one of them said to me: Such an outcry is made against the criminals because they do not work; but if we did not exist, "an immense number of persons"--jailers, policemen, judges and lawyers--would be without a "profitable occupation!" * * * * * After having noted these _specimens_ of unscientific carelessness, and before entering upon the examination of the few scientific arguments developed by M. Garofalo, it will be well, to aid us in forming a general judgment on his book, to show how far he has forgotten the most elementary rules of the scientific method. And it will be useful also to add a few examples of mistakes in regard to facts bearing either on science in general, or on the doctrines combated by him. On page 41, speaking of the scientific work of Marx with a disdain which can not be taken seriously, since it is too much like that of the theologians for Darwin or that of the jurists for Lombroso, he reasons in this curious fashion: "Starting from the hypothesis that all private property is unjust, it is not logic that is wanting in the doctrine of Marx. But _if one recognizes_, on the contrary, _that every individual has a right to possess some thing of his own_, the direct and inevitable consequence is [the rightfulness of] the profits of capital, and, therefore, the augmentation of the latter." Certainly, if one admits _a priori_ the right of individual property in the land and the means of production ... it is needless and useless to discuss the question. But the troublesome fact is that all the scientific work of Marx and the socialists has been done precisely in order to furnish absolute scientific proof of the true genesis of capitalist property--the unpaid surplus-labor of the laborer--and to put an end to the old fables about "the first occupant," and "accumulated savings" which are only exceptions, ever becoming rarer. Moreover, the negation of private property is not "the hypothesis," but the logical and inevitable consequence of the premises of _facts_ and of _historical_ demonstrations made, not only by Marx, but by a numerous group of sociologists who, abandoning the reticence and mental reservations of orthodox conventionalism, have, by that step, become socialists. * * * * *