The total number condemned to imprisonment by the French tribunals, and detained by the police, in the ten years 1879-88, was 1,675,000; the Tribunal sentences under six days being 113,000.

And the total condemned to punishments of various kinds, by Assize Courts, Tribunals, and police courts, reached in the same ten years the enormous number of 6,440,000 individuals!

The meaning of this is that penal justice at the present moment is a vast machine, devouring and casting up again an enormous number of individuals, who lose amongst its wheels their life, their honour, their moral sense, and their health, bearing thenceforth the ineffaceable scars, and falling into the ever-growing ranks of professional crime and recidivism, too often without a hope of recovery.[19]

[19] As regards recidivism and the enormous numbers tried, England is in as bad a position as Italy and France. See my articles in Nineteenth Century, 1892, and Fortnightly Review, 1894.--ED.

It is impossible, then, to deny the urgent necessity of substituting for our present penal organisation a better system corresponding to the governing conditions of crime, more effectual for social defence, and at the same time less gratuitously disastrous for the individuals with whom it deals.

The positive school, in addition to the partial reforms proposed by Lombroso, and by myself in the second edition of this work, has put forward in the Criminology of Garofalo a ``rational system of punishment,'' whereof it is desirable to give a summary.

I. MURDERERS (moral insensibility and instinctive cruelty) who commit--

Murder for greed, or other selfish gratification Criminal Lunatic Asylums: or Murder unprovoked by the victim the death penalty. Murder with attendant cruelty