Note 437 — Chapter II
Henry P. (Henry Pomeroy) Horton translation
As the figures reproduced above (pp. 535–542) have shown, the crimes with which we have now to concern ourselves are relatively rare. It is unnecessary to say that this has not always been so, but that there have been great changes in this regard. At one time robbery and similar acts of violence were the ordinary forms of professional crime. Happily for peaceable folk this is no longer the case; these crimes have been in large measure replaced by others less serious, like theft and fraud.437 All modern states have not reached the same stage of development, nor all parts of the same state. There are those of them that, more than others, recall the past to us. So is it in regard to their criminality. While robbery may be said to have disappeared from the states of northern Europe, it is still very common in a country like Italy, and is met much less frequently in the modernized provinces of northern Italy than in the backward southern provinces, as the following figures show.438