ower down the
social scale, but met them at the lowest steps, and, halter in hand,
gravely professed the utmost concern in their future and eternal
welfare.

So far, society has failed to recognise the end of the punishment it is
entitled to impose. In the words of Dimitri Drill, a Moscow publicist,
the new penology expresses that it "renounces entirely the law of
retaliation as end, principle, or basis of all judicial punishment. The
basis and purpose of punishment is the necessity of protecting society
against the evil consequences of crime either by the moral reclamation
of the criminal or by his separation from society; punishment is not to
satisfy vengeance." We must not jump to the hasty conclusion that herein
is meant that the criminal must be treated very gently and coaxed back
to more virtuous paths. What is meant is that his punishment should be
made purgatorial and not infernal. The process of reclamation is
accompanied by far sharper pains than those which are expiatory, but
they are the pains of a healing surgery and not those of a soul
destroying brutality. Where the means for reclamation fail then
separation from society is advocated. Separation in the midst of
influences which would always tend to awaken the desire to reform and
which would give immediate assistance to that desire when awakened.

Thus the recognition of this fact that the authority to punish offenders
against its law has been, by God, delegated to the social institution,
brings with it a recognition of the responsibility which accompanies
such authority.

In primitive times most offences were punished by the death penalty, not
as a vindictive measure but because the offender was hopeless and
society helpless. That is, the social state being of a very simple
order, any infraction of its laws would declare the offender a most
pronounced criminal, bitterly hostile to society and irreclaimable by
such social machinery as then existed. The death penalty when inflicted
must ever be so regarded. Not as a life for a life but as the punishment
inflicted upon one who has by his own conduct given complete evidence
that his recovery to the social state is impossible. In this century of
civilisation it is incumbent to look upon the criminal as being in a
measure a by-product of society and to deal with him accordingly.
Outside of society crime is impossible, therefore society accounts for
crime and is also in a measure responsible for it. To this