be discovered which raises under all circumstances the sense of shame, that punishment will have a value of its own." His reply to the second is just and conclusive: "What is intended when it is said that whipping brutalizes? Is it that it appeals to the offender's animal nature as distinguished from his moral nature? Why every punishment deserving the name inflicts physical pain. . . . When you sentence a criminal to punishment you deliberately make up your mind to render him extremely uncomfortable; and, for my part, I cannot in the least understand why one form or degree of physical pain should brutalize more than another."* But the punishment of criminals is also intended to act as a warning to others. It is a dictum of Aristotle that "the multitude obey on compulsion rather than principle, and from fear of penalties rather than from a sense of right." Hence the example of the punished person is of general utility; nor is it any real hardship to him that it should be so. No man liveth to himself. We are members one of another, knit together by a necessity arising out of the nature of things, which is rational, in the social organism whose law is reason. And a man who will not obey that law, but abandons himself to mere animal impulse, divests himself, so far as in him lies, of his dignity as a person, and reduces himself to the level of irrational existence. To the social

*"Life and Speeches of Sir Henry Maine," p. 122. I translate my quotations out of the obliqua oratio in which this speech is unfortunately reported.

It is on this consideration that Aquinas founds his justification of capital punishment. "Man by sinning withdraws from the

order of reason, and thereby falls from human

dignity, so far as that consists in man being naturally free and existent for his own sake.

And, therefore, though to kill a man while he abides in his native dignity be a thing of itself evil, yet to kill a man who is a sinner may be good, as to kill a wild beast. For worse is an evil man than a wild beast, and more noxious, as the Philosopher says, 2, 2 q. 64 a. 2 ad 3. In this connection we

may recall the verse of Schiller: "Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht." I should add that the death penalty is the supreme terror of men of blood. "I don't care what I get so long as I don't swing," was the expression of one of them recently tried for the capital offence, and unfortunately found guilty NEW SERIES.-VOL. LIX., No. 4.

organism in which we find ourselves we owe service. There are incumbent upon us duties toward the State correlative with our rights which acquire validity in the State. And if a man will not serve the community by performing those duties, it is just that he should be made to serve it as a warning to others of the consequences of violating them.

But there is a third end of punishment. It is first vindictive, and, secondly, deterrent. It should also be, if possible, reformatory. And so Clement XI., in the inscription over the gate of St. Michele-the first of the model prisons and the pattern of the rest-which so struck John Howard, "Parum est improbos coercere poena nisi probos efficias disciplina." Society does not cease to owe duties even to those who put themselves beyond its pale. And there are few more excellent fruits of that humanism which is a special characteristic of this age, than the widespread endeavor to make punishment the instrument of amendment. We are told that we may reasonably expect it to prick the conscience, to bring the crime before the mental vision of the criminal in true color and right proportions, to lead him to desire his own amendment, and to work with those who are striving to help him in the better way: "Getting increase of knowledge since he learns,

Because he lives, what is to be a man; Set to instruct himself by his past self." It is saddening to think how little these expectations are fulfilled. "The theory," Sir Henry Maine observed in the speech from which I have already directed toward the reformation of the quoted," that all punishment should be criminal has been thoroughly tested.

What is the result? Twenty or thirty years of costly experiments have simply brought out the fact that by looking too exclusively to the reformatory side of punishment, you have not only not reformed your criminals, but have actually increased the criminal class."*

I believe I am warranted in saying that eighty per cent. of those who have been in prison, commit crime again.

only of manslaughter. The sentiment is common to the class. * "Life and Speeches," p. 123.

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lation. ""*

Now what are the reasons for this failure? One I think is excellently indicated in certain words of the late Archbishop Ullathorne, himself most successful in dealing with the worst criminals: Many advocates of political and social reform are admirable in inventing expedients for regenerating human nature, if it were not that the nature to be regenerated is missed out of the calcuOne of the common errors of the present day is to take an optimist view of humanity, flatly opposed to facts. It is the delusion to which Rousseau gave such wide currency-that man is born good, and which has been formulated by his principal English admirer and exponent in the dictum: "The evil in the world is the result of bad education and bad institutions." Now if anything is absolutely certain it is that there is innate in every human being a propensity which renders him. prone to evil and averse from good. Nitimur in vetitum semper cupimus. que negata," said the Roman poet. It is invariably true. You may get rid of the name of original sin; but the thing which the name represents is a primordial permanent ingredient of human nature, explain it how you will. It is aboriginal, not adventitious; congenital, not the product of bad education and bad institutions. It is more in one and less in another. But in whatever proportion, it is always there, a taint transmitted by heredity. It is this taint which vitiates the will, and that vitiation breeds evil deeds. To hinder a man from such deeds by fear of consequences is not to reform him. Every real reform must rest upon the cure of the vitiated volition. It must be moral, not mechanical; psychical, not physical; it must start from within, not from without. Its motive power must be something which acts directly and powerfully upon the will. Where shall we find such an agent?

In education, we are often told. But education is a question-begging word. If mere intellectual instruction is meant by it as is generally the case-experience is conclusive that such instruction is not in itself moralizing. Mere knowl

"The Management of Criminals," p. 24. + Morley's Diderot," vol. i. p. 5.

edge does not convert the will from bad to good. How should it? Lombroso, in his "L'Uomo Delinquente," testifies that the number of malefactors is greatest, relatively, in the liberal professions. An English expert, who speaks on the subject with an authority possessed by few, tells us that "the worst thieves are those who have previously had a training in reformatories and Board schools, and that the most depraved girls and women are among the more educated ones. No; mere knowledge is one thing. Virtue is quite another. Experience confirms the assertion that, taking mankind as a whole, the effectual reform of human nature can be achieved only by an agent above nature. "Philosophia dux vitæ," said the ancients. But what is philosophy? It is a theory of being, of speculative thought; its proper object to contemplate the world as a manifestation of spirit. A mere system of speculative physics such as, for example, Mr. Herbert Spencer's, however ingenious and interesting, is not philosophy at all. Hartmann truly says: " Philosophy is essentially concerned with the one feeling only to be mystically apprehended, namely, the relation of the individual with the Absolute." Its very function is to raise man above the self of the senses and animal nature, and to approximate him to the Divine. I am far from denying, indeed I strenuously maintain, that in discharging that function, it may attain to a clear perception of ethical truth; that the human reason, rightly exercised, is adequate to the deduction of moral rules which shall indicate those limits of right action, "quos ultraque_citraque nequit consistere rectum." But how many men are capable of laying hold of a system of abstract thought and translating it into action? For the vast multitude of men the only effective teacher of morality is religion, which affords it a sanction and reward, which incarnates it in august symbolism, and works upon volition by touching the heart. This is and always must be true of the overwhelming majority of men; it is pre-eminently true of the criminal

* Mr. Neame, "a chief superintendent of discharged convicts in London," quoted by Tallack, "Penological and Preventive Principles," p. 186.

ethical discipline, of training of the will -this alone is education in the true sense which, as experience demonstrates, will, in many cases, make of these unhappy children men fitted for their appointed place in the social order ready, patiently and profitably, to fulfil their allotted tasks in it. I began this discussion with Victor Hugo. A few of the words with which he points the moral of his powerful and pathetic tale may serve to end it:

'Développez de votre mieux ces malheureuses têtes, afin que l'intelligence qui est dedans puisse grandir. [mais] ne laissez pas sans direction cette intelligence que vous aurez développée. Ce serait un autre désordre. L'ignorance vaut encore mieux que la mauvaise science. Non. Souvenez-vous qu'il y a un

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livre plus philosophique que le Compère Mathieu, plus populaire que le Constitutionel, plus éternel que la Charte de 1830; c'est Î'Ecriture sainte. Etici un mot d'explication. Quoique vous fassiez, le sort de la grande foule, de la multitude, de la majorité, sera toujours relativement pauvre, et malheureux, et triste. À elle le dur travail, les fardeaux à pousser, les fardeaux à traîner, les fardeaux à porter. Examinez cette balance: toutes les jouissances dans le plateau du riche, toutes les misères dans le plateau du pauvre. Les deux parts ne sontelles pas inégales? La balance ne doit-elle pas pencher, et l'État avec elle? Et maintenant dans le lot du pauvre, dans le plateau des misères, jetez la certitude d'un avenir céleste, jetez l'aspiration au bonheur éternel, jetez le paradis, contre-poids magnifique ! Vous rétablissez l'équilibre. La part du pauvre est aussi riche que la part du riche. C'est ce que savait Jésus."

-Contemporary Review.

IN a former paper we took a brief glance at some of the customs of uncultured man. We saw how his habits, by a slight refinement, modified through living in a fixed spot, and by receiving the sanction of large bodies of his fellows, merged into a crude civilization which here and there expanded into fulness and developed unknown and almost miraculous mental and moral growths. It is an extraordinary spectacle. A naked animal, physically weaker than hundreds that roamed around him, exposed to a thousand dangers on every side, overcomes them all by the exercise of cunning and concerted action, and becomes the lord paramount of the earth. Wealth and leisure succeed, and with them intellectual contemplation and inventive energies. Destructive faculties give way to constructive. The savage hunter, leading a precarious life of want and hardships, is led by necessity or genius to tame and cherish the animals that sustain him. But he multiplies faster than his flocks and herds, and again other systems must be devised: he becomes a rude tiller of the ground. New wants and new desires are thus created, and manufactures follow. These breed trade and luxuries. The

wigwam has given way to a hut, the solitary hut to a cluster, the hamlets to villages, these to towns, and towns to cities. The descendant of the wandering, naked, wild man of the woods is a well-clad, sober, thoughtful citizen, a member of a great society in which all are pledged to protect each other, and in which each sacrifices a large part of his freedom for the advantages which he receives.

The first people known to have reached the highest and most ancient civilization were the Egyptians. Maspero, Morton, and Owen agree that they were a branch of the great Caucasian type, and this is generally admitted, but Professor Huxley supposes them to have descended from the aborigines of an ancient continent allied to the Australian. It is certain that they came to Egypt as conquerors or colonizers, most probably as both. The earth contains many mysteries relating to extinct greatnesses of humanity. Easter Island in the Pacific, for instance, is an insoluble puzzle, and baffles all attempts of scientists to theorize on its remains. catan is almost as difficult to explain. We shall, perhaps, never know how many embryonic civilizations have perished before one came to maturity.

Yu