Note 24 — Chapter VII · THE THIRD SCHOOL1 AND THE SOCIALISTS.

“In the second place, the economic causes that affect the tendency to crime reveal an immense solidarity, which continues to extend itself into space, as heredity plunges its roots into time. The great fluctuations in prices are common to the whole world, and the individual whom these perturbations drive to crime by a series of shocks, comes into conflict with a great number of other individuals, without being conscious of this infinite solidarity. But science must endeavor to collect the evidence of it. Finally these great economic influences tend, on the one hand, to reduce the field of the individual responsibility, and on the other, to give a precise character to the responsibility of society in this connection. It is responsible, in fact, within the limits within which it might have restrained the economic fluctuations and corrected their effects, but has not done so. Here the terrible saying of Quetelet is still true: society herself has put the weapon into the hand of the criminal.”24