hood at any time afterward. The new law will work in a direction exactly the opposite. The man who has been let off unpunished, but "iot unsentenced, will have the strongest possible inducement to keep straight for the future. He will have received a grave warn ing, and he will know that it will depend upon himself whether the consequences are to end with this. If he has become a crim inal, so to say, by accident, the probability is that he will stop short at the first offence. If he is a true criminal, — a criminal by set pur pose, a man whose instincts or training lead him to prefer a life of crime, with its shifts and dangers and escapes, to the obligation of steady work, — it is pretty certain that he will make a bad use of the chance allowed him, and that he will suffer accordingly as he de serves. Under the present French system, these two very different orders of men are as likely as not to have the same treatment, and it does not tend to reform either of them. The new law gives them both a chance and an inducement to turn over a new leaf; and if only one of them takes advantage of it, the fault henceforth will be with the man, and not with the law. The treatment of criminals in this country has been a subject in which sentiment has played much too large a part. In this, as in other matters, public opinon is apt to oscillate between opposite extremes and the law fol lows opinion, at a distance no doubt, but in the direction of the same end. The old law, before Bentham and Romilly, was brutally and unjustifiably severe. Death was the pun ishment of some scores of offences, many of them of the most trumpery kind. This method did not succeed in puting down crime. Candidates for the gallows were as numerous as ever, and as Monday morning came round fresh batches of them were turned off. Since that time we have swung round to the opposite extreme, and we have come to allow to habitual crime a practical immunity to which it has no claim of right. The man who comes up again and again for the same offence, and who is no sooner out of
prison than he sets to work at once to qualify himself for a new sentence, is suffered toescape on each occasion very much more easily than he deserves. In the cant of the day he has another chance given him, and he uses it exactly as we might expect. In the opinion of some, even of our judges, this is as it should be. An offence, they hold, is blotted out when the appointed punishment has been suffered for it, and it is not to be remembered to the disadvantage of the crim inal when he next comes before the court. This is a doctrine to which the whole crim inal class would most readily subscribe. It is in their interest that it has been promul gated; since it enables them to live exactly the life which they prefer, with no more than what they accept as the fair risks of their calling. It is well, however, that our dislike of severity has not stopped here. It has found more worthy objects than the irreclaim able scoundrels who offend as often as they have the chance. We have learned, as the French are learning, that first offences may often be lightly visited with no danger to society, and it has been left to the discretion of the court to deal with some of them as the case may be thought to warrant. The fact is that a first offence, even when it has been punished by imprisonment, is ordi narily a last offence. The number of those who are reconvicted does not form a large percentage of the whole. The question sug gests itself whether the imprisonment has not been wasted, and whether under the new French system the same result may not be attained more certainly and without the suffering and degradation which impris onment causes and leaves after it. The ex periment is well worth trying, and it is not considered to have failed, as far as it has been tried as yet. It may be extended with advantage to the old as well as to the young. The man who has passed many years of his life without having fallen into crime, and who offends at last, is not likely to be a member of the real criminal class, and he may at least claim the benefit of the doubt. If he
