these moral lunatics; both suffer from cerebral disease; we have ceased to torment the ordinary lunatic with the whip and fetters, to put him in a dark cell, to feed him on bread and water; but we still use these methods with his fellow-patient, whose disease merely affects a different part of the brain, and who, unhappily for him, is suffering from a malady which is supposed to be particularly offensive to God!
Where crimes are of a brutal nature, implying a low type in the committer, it might be well to draft him from the place of restraint into the army, where the discipline would still further train the lower nature, and aid such development as it may be capable of.
In such a system as that proposed, prisons, in the present sense of the word, would be abolished. Their place would be taken by training colleges for the undeveloped natures, and asylums for the incurably diseased. All the brutalising influences of the prison would disappear, and the fallen would be helped to stand, instead of beaten because they fell.
One enormous advantage which would accrue from the adoption of such treatment as I propose would be the cessation of the manufacture of criminals. Now, some degraded criminal is turned loose from gaol, rushes back to his old haunts, drinks himself mad to celebrate his release, drags some half-drunken prostitute into his embrace, and a new life is born of the union. What can that life be save one which while it lasts is stamped with the shame and the horror of its commencement? And so criminals are bred, and Society steps in to punish, but never to prevent.
And has Society no duty of prevention ere the criminal is to be dealt with? Here, indeed, is the root treatment. "Want of understanding, poverty, and want of education, these are the three principal sources from which crime springs. The philosopher Plato was in his time keen enough to say: 'Crime has its foundation in the want of education, and in the bad training and arrangements of the State'" ("Force and Matter," pp. 473, 474). Bad houses, bad air, bad food, evil surroundings, acting on natures which inherit the results of similar conditions on past generations, must generate and foster crime. The lower strata of society must be uplifted ere criminals will
