has failed at least three times. According
to the judicial statistics for England and Wales, imprisonment is
successful after the third time in about 80 per cent. of the cases
annually submitted to the criminal courts, and although it is a pity
that the percentage is not higher, yet it cannot fairly be said that
such results are an evidence of failure. The prison is unquestionably
a much less effective weapon for dealing with crime among Continental
peoples, and in the United States, than it has shown itself to be in
Great Britain; but this failure arises in the main from the laxity and
indulgence with which criminals are treated in foreign prisons. A
prison to possess any reformative value must always be made an
uncomfortable place to live in; Continental peoples and the people of
America have to a large extent lost sight of this fact; hence the
failure of their penal systems to stop the growth of the delinquent
population. If, however, imprisonment is not allowed to degenerate
into mere detention, it is bound to act as a powerful deterrent upon
grown-up offenders, and it is the only menace which will effectually
keep many of them within the law. The hope of reward and the fear of
punishment, or, in other words, love of pleasure, and dread of pain,
are the two most deeply seated instincts in the human breast; if Mr.
Darwin's theory be correct, it is through the operation of these
fundamental instincts that such a being as man has come into existence
at all. In any case these instincts have hitherto been the chief
ingredients of all human progress, the most effective spur to energy
of all kinds, and when properly utilised they are the most potent of
all deterrents to crime. Were it possible for the hand of social
justice to descend on every criminal with infallible certainty; were
it universally true that no crime could possibly escape punishment,
that every offence against society would inevitably and immediately be
visited on the offender, the tendency to commit crime would probably
become as rare as the tendency of an ordinary human being to thrust
his hand into the fire. The uncertainty of punishment is the great
bulwark of crime, and crime has a marvellous knack of diminishing in
proportion as this uncertainty decreases. No amelioration of the
material circumstances of the community can destroy all the causes of
crime, and till moral progress has reached a height hitherto attained
only by the elect of the race, one