But can we
believe that the courageous work of a few public writers has touched the
roots of the Camorra in this city? It would be self-deception to think
so. For we see that plants blossom out again, even after the most
destructive hurricane has passed over them.
The healing of society is not so easy, that a collective plague may be
cured by the courageous acts of one or more individuals. The process is
much slower and more complicated. Nevertheless these episodes are
milestones of victory in the onward march of civilization, which will
paralyze the historical manifestations of social criminality. Here,
then, we have a city in which some hundred thousand people rise every
morning and do not know how to get a living, who have no fixed
occupation, because there is not enough industrial development to reach
that methodical application of labor which lifted humanity out of the
prehistoric forests. Truly, the human race progresses by two uplifting
energies: War and labor.
In primitive and savage society, when the human personality did not know
the check of social discipline, a military discipline held the members
of the tribe together. But war, while useful in primitive society, loses
its usefulness more and more, because it carries within itself the
cancer that paralyzes it.
While war compels collective groups to submit to the co-ordinating
discipline of human activity, it also decreases the respect for human
life.
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