The ruling classes, who do not probe matters to the bottom, or do not like to, seek to meet the evil after their own fashion. If poverty and want, and, as a result therefrom, demoralization and crime increase, the source of the evil is not searched after, so that it may be stopped; no; the products of the conditions are punished. The more gigantic the evils grow, and the numbers of evil-doers multiply in proportion, proportionately severe penalties and persecutions are deemed necessary. It is sought to drive out the devil with Beelzebub. Prof. Haeckel also considers it proper to proceed against criminals with the severest punishments possible, and that capital punishment, in particular, be stringently applied.[162] By this stand the Professor places himself in sweet accord with the re-actionists of all shades, who otherwise are mortally opposed to him. Haeckel is of the opinion that incorrigible scape-graces must be uprooted like weeds that take from plants light, air and space. Had Haeckel turned his mind slightly toward social, instead of engaging it wholly with natural science, he would know that these criminals could, in most instances, be transformed into useful members of human society, provided society offered them the requisite conditions of existence. He would also find that the annihilation of individual criminals or the rendering of them harmless, prevents as little the commission of fresh crimes in society, as the removal of weeds on a field would prevent their returning if the roots and seeds are not likewise destroyed. Absolutely to prevent the forming of harmful organisms in Nature is a feat man never will be able to achieve but _to so improve his own social system, a system produced by himself, that it may afford favorable conditions of life for all, and furnish to each equal freedom to unfold, to the end that they no longer need suffer hunger, or be driven to satisfy their desire for property, or their ambition at the expense of others--that is possible_. Let the cause of the crimes be studied, and let that be removed; then will the crimes themselves be wiped out.[163] Those who would remove crimes by removing the causes thereof, cannot, as a matter of course, sympathize with a plan of brutal suppression. They cannot prevent society from protecting itself after its own fashion against the criminals, whom it cannot allow a free hand; but we demand all the more urgently the radical reformation of society, i. e., the removal of the causes of crime.