are running from, and there’s a world of difference there.”

The jurist, therefore, in a matter of criminal adjudication, entirely loses sight of the personal conditions of the accused, and the social conditions of the community, and confines his attention to the deed, and to the maxims of a so-called retributive justice. They who are called upon to try criminals ought to possess the ideas necessary to the natural study of a criminal man, and should therefore constitute an order of magistrates wholly distinct from that of civil judges.

The practical means of securing this fundamental reform of the judicial bench ought to begin with the organisation of the university, for in the courses of the faculty of law it will be necessary to introduce a more vigorous and modern stream of social and anthropological studies, which must also eventually put new life into the ancient maxims of the civil law.

In the second place, law students at the university ought to be admitted to what Ellero called a science of clinical criminology, that is to interviews with and systematic observations of prisoners. The first Congress of Criminal Anthropology approved the proposal of M. Tarde, upon the following motion of Moleschot- Ferri:--``The Congress, in agreement with the scientific tendency of criminal anthropology, is of opinion that prison authorities, whilst taking necessary precautions for internal discipline, and for the individual rights of condemned prisoners, should admit to the clinical study of criminals all professors and students of penal law and legal medicine, under the direction and responsibility of their own professors, and if possible in the character of societies for the aid of actual and discharged prisoners.''

Lastly, a special school should be founded for policemen and prison warders, with the object of securing detectives distinguished not only for their personal ability, but also for their knowledge of criminal biology and psychology.

To these reforms, which guarantee the scientific capacity of the criminal judge, we must add reforms which would secure his complete independence of the executive authority, which is now the only authority responsible for the advancement and allocation of judges. But this independence would not be exempt from every kind of control, such as public opinion, and disciplinary authority to some extent distinct from the personnel of the bench; for otherwise the judicial authority would soon become another form of insupportable tyranny.

The most effectual mode of securing the independence of the judges is to improve their position in life. For admitting that a fixed stipend, payable every month, makes a man content with a somewhat lower figure, still it is certain that in these days, with a few honourable exceptions, the selection of judges is not satisfactory, because low salaries only attract such as could not earn more by the practice of their profession.

The personal character of the bench vitally affects the quality of the government as a whole. The most academic and exalted codes are of little avail if there are not good judges to administer them; but with good judges it matters little if the codes or statutes are imperfect.

In criminal law the application of the statute to the particular case is not, or should not be, a mere question of legal and abstract logic, as it is in civil law. It involves the adaptation of an abstract rule, in a psychological sense, to a living and breathing man; for the criminal judge cannot separate himself from the environment and social life, so as to become a more or less mechanical lex loquens. The living and human tests of every criminal sentence reside in the conditions of the act, the author, and reacting society, far more than in the written law.