Note 9 — Chapter VI · THE SPIRITUALISTS.1

If the question treated by Joly is incomplete, what he says neither has any great value, nor does it prove at all his statement that the influence of economic conditions is small. He gives but a few pages to the very difficult question of whether the standard of living of the working class has been raised. He brings out the universally observed fact that the wants of all classes have increased, but he seems not to have noted that this is intimately bound up with the present mode of production. He cites the testimony of an old police officer, and the investigations of a magistrate (investigations, it may be said in passing, that reached the colossal number of 107 cases) in order to prove that most crimes are not committed as a consequence of immediate privations—as if this were enough to solve the question of how far economic conditions enter into the causes of crime.—9