which still survive in our day as living reminders of the barbarian stage. We still hear the "public vengeance" invoked against the criminal today, and justice has still for its symbol a sword, which it uses more than the scales. But a judge born of a woman cannot weigh the moral responsibility of one who has committed murder or theft. Not until the experimental and scientific method shall look for the causes of that dangerous malady, which we call crime, in the physical and psychic organism, and in the family and the environment, of the criminal, will justice guided by science discard the sword which now descends bloody upon those poor fellow-beings who have fallen victims to crime, and become a clinical function, whose prime object shall be to remove or lessen in society and individuals the causes which incite to crime. Then alone will justice refrain from wreaking vengeance, after a crime has been committed, with the shame of an execution or the absurdity of solitary confinement.

On the one hand, human life depends on the word of a judge, who may err in the case of capital punishment; and society cannot end the life of a man, unless the necessity of legitimate self-defense demands it. On the other hand, solitary confinement came in with the second current of the classic school of criminology, when at the same time, in which Beccaria promulgated his ideas, John Howard traveled all over Europe describing the unmentionable horrors of mass imprisonment, which became a center of infection for society at large. Then the classic school went to the other extreme of solitary confinement, after the model of America, whence we adopted the systems of Philadelphia and Harrisburg in the first half of the nineteenth century. Isolation for the night is also our demand, but we object to continuous solitary confinement by day and night. Pasquale Mancini called solitary confinement "a living grave," in order to reassure the timorous, when in the name of the classic school, whose valiant champion he was, he demanded in 1876 the abolition of capital punishment. Yet in his swan song he recognized that the future would belong to the positive school of criminology. And it is this "living grave" against which we protest. It cannot possibly be an act of human justice to bury a human being in a narrow cell, within four walls, to prevent this being from having any contact with social life, and to say to him at the end of his term: Now that your lungs are no longer accustomed to breathing the open air, now that your legs are no longer used to the rough roads, go, but take care not, to have a relapse, or your sentence will be twice as hard.

In reality, solitary confinement makes of a human being either a stupid creature, or a raving beast. And "s'io dico il vero, l'effeto nol nasconde"—if I speak the truth, the facts will also reveal it—for criminality increases and expands, honest people remain unprotected, and those who are struck by the law do not improve, but become ever more antisocial through the repeated relapses. And so we have that contrast which I mentioned in the beginning of my lecture, that the theoretical side of criminal science is so perfected, while criminal conditions are painfully in evidence. The inevitable conclusion is the necessity of a progressive transformation of the science of crime and punishment.

OF CRIMINOLOGY.

II.

We saw yesterday in a short historical review that the classic cycle of the science of crime and punishment, originated by Cesare Beccaria more than a century ago, was followed in our country, some twenty years since, by the scientific movement of the positive school of criminology. Let us see today how this school studied the problem of criminality, reserving for tomorrow the discussion of the remedies proposal by this school for the disease of criminality.

When a crime is committed in some place, attracting public attention either through the atrocity of the case or the strangeness of the criminal deed—for instance, one that is not connected with bloodshed, but with intellectual fraud—there are at once two tendencies that make themselves felt in the public conscience. One of them, pervading the overwhelming majority of individual consciences, asks: How is this? What for? Why did that man commit such a crime? This question is asked by everybody and occupies mostly the attention of those who do not look upon the case from the point of view of criminology. On the other hand, those who occupy themselves with criminal law represent the other tendency, which manifests itself when acquainted with the news of this crime. This is a limited portion of the public conscience, which tries to study the problem from the standpoint of the technical jurist. The lawyers, the judges, the officials of the police, ask themselves: What is the name of the crime committed by that man under such circumstances? Must it be classed us murder or patricide, attempted or incompleted manslaughter, and, if directed against property, is it theft, or illegal appropriation, or fraud? And the entire apparatus of practical criminal justice forgets at once the first problem, which occupies the majority of the public conscience, the question of the causes that led to this crime, in order to devote itself exclusively to the technical side of the problem which constitutes the juridical anatomy of the inhuman and antisocial deed perpetrated by the criminal.

In these two tendencies you have a photographic reproduction of the two schools of criminology. The classic school, which looks upon the crime as a juridical problem, occupies itself with its name, its definition, its juridical analysis, leaves the personality of the criminal in the background and remembers it only so far as exceptional circumstances explicitly stated in the law books refer to it: whether he is a minor, a deaf-mute, whether it is a case of insanity, whether he was drunk at the time the crime was committed. Only in these strictly defined cases does the classic school occupy itself theoretically with the personality of the criminal. But ninety times in one hundred these exceptional circumstances do not exist or cannot be shown to exist, and penal justice limits itself to the technical definition of the fact. But when the case comes up in the criminal court, or before the jurors, practice demonstrates that there is seldom a discussion between the lawyers of the defense and the judges for the purpose of ascertaining the most exact definition of the fact, of determining whether it is a case of attempted or merely projected crime, of finding out whether there are any of the juridical elements defined in this or that article of the code. The judge is rather face to face with the problem of ascertaining why, under what conditions, for what reasons, the man has committed the crime. This is the supreme and simple human problem. But hitherto it has been left to a more or less perspicacious, more or less gifted, empiricism, and there have been no scientific standards, no methodical collection of facts, no observations and conclusions, save those of the positive school of criminology. This school alone makes an attempt to solve in every case of crime the problem of its natural origin, of the reasons and conditions that induced a man to commit such and such a crime.

For instance, about 3,000 cases of manslaughter are registered every year in Italy. Now, open any work inspired by the classic school of criminology, and ask the author why 3,000 men are the victims of manslaughter every year in Italy, and how it is that there are not sometimes only as many as, say, 300 cases, the number committed in England, which has nearly the same number of inhabitants as Italy; and how it is that there are not sometimes 300,000 such cases in Italy instead of 3,000?

It is useless to open any work of classical criminology for this purpose, for you will not find an answer to these questions in than. No one, from Beccaria to Carrara, has ever thought of this