The economists do not know yet what the principle
of value is; but they know, within a few decimals, the
proportionality of crime. So many thousand souls, so many
malefactors, so many condemnations: about that there can be no
mistake. It is one of the most beautiful applications of the
theory of chances, and the most advanced branch of economic
science. If socialism had invented this accusing theory, the
whole world would have cried calumny.
Yet, after all, what is there in it that should surprise us? As
misery is a necessary result of the contradictions of society, a
result which it is possible to determine mathematically from the
rate of interest, the rate of wages, and the prevailing
market-prices, so crimes and misdemeanors are another effect of
this same antagonism, susceptible, like its cause, of estimation
by figures. The materialists have drawn the silliest inferences
from this subordination of liberty to the laws of numbers: as if
man were not under the influence of all that surrounds him, and
as if, since all that surrounds him is governed by inexorable
laws, he must not experience, in his freest manifestations, the
reaction of those laws!
The same character of necessity which we have just pointed out in
the establishment and sustenance of criminal justice is found,
but under a more metaphysical aspect, in its morality.
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