Note 2 — Chapter V · THE BIO-SOCIOLOGISTS.

“In a quarter subjected to detestable hygiene, built upon marshy soil, devoid of drainage and potable water, furrowed with narrow and filthy streets, covered with hovels without life or air, where an atrophied population vegetates, epidemics are inevitable and propagate themselves with great intensity. In the same way, crime finds an easy and certain prey in the environment of the poor of a great city. The illegitimate and abandoned children, the children of convicts and prostitutes, the vagrants, etc. are so many designated recruits. Without family, without traditions, without fixed home or settled occupation, without relations with the ruling classes, what wonder that they have no other motive than complete egoism, no other activity than selfish and transitory efforts for the immediate satisfaction of their material appetites? The emigration from the country to the city still further increases this army and multiplies the chances of crime. When the sons of peasants leave the plow for the workshop and come to seek fortune in the furnace of great cities, they follow the spirit of adventure; they must have, at any price, a means of subsistence, and as competition is great and temptations arise at every step, the prisons profit by this overplus that the country gives to the city. Another consequence of the immigration from the country is that the population becomes excessive, places are lacking, and wages fall below the living expenses. Ducpetiaux showed, in 1856, that the budget of the working-man in the great cities is lower than the sum representing the budget of the working-man in prison. This situation has not changed, and the laboring class, badly lodged, badly nourished, vegetate at the mercy of economic crises. The working-man is always on the verge of vagrancy, the vagrant always on the verge of crime. The whole proletariat is thus exposed in the front rank, and whether it is a question of sickness or crime, it is the first to fall.”2