n when the first fraternal brawl sent one brother into his
grave, and another into exile with the perpetual brand of a murderer
blazing upon his terror-stricken brow.

The savage settles the matter with a tomahawk or a war club. The remedy
is at least effectual, and society in the kraal or the tepee does not
bother its dusky brain about the possible reform of the offender. Any
type of criminality that is inconvenient or unpopular is, therefore,
summarily buried in the nearest grave.

Up to the time of the Christian era, the savage and the civilized man
alike held substantially the same theories. The one idea that dominated
all criminal law was punishment. The statutes of Draco and Lycurgus
never harbored the thought of moral improvement, much less made
provision for the reform of the criminal. Roman law and Greek law were
little better. The one right which all offenders possessed was the right
to be punished. Reformation was entirely a personal matter, which
theoretically in rare instances was possible, to which the law, save in
capital cases, interposed no special obstacles, and to which it gave no
special encouragement.

With the advent of a new and more merciful dispensation, we find
gradually creeping in a belief that the criminal classes have some
rights which society is bound to respect, and that not the least
important of these is the right to reform. For two thousand years these
not necessarily conflicting ideas of reform and punishment have
travelled down the centuries in a medley of incongruous and often
contradictory systems of criminal law. As the better classes have
generally made and administered the law, it is not strange that the
elder and more savage idea has on the whole been dominant, and that,
taking the world together, the reform of criminals is still rather a
side issue than an object of far-reaching and systematic legislative
enactment.

Even the most optimistic student of penology would be compelled to admit
that our present methods of dealing with criminals are unsatisfactory to
the last degree. Our systems of punishment do not punish in any such
sense as to be a terror to evil-doers; our systems of reformation do not
reform. The whole thing goes on in a vicious round of self-perpetuating
infamy. The central idea of our modern penal system--and it is certainly
a very venerable one--is that in some way the world will be greatly
benefited by shutting up its law-breakers for a longer or shorter