ted classes in Europe and
America. All that civilisation has hitherto done is to change the form
in which crime is perpetrated; in substance it remains the same.
Primary Schools will not accomplish much in eliminating crime. The
merely intellectual training received in these institutions has little
salutary influence upon conduct. Nothing can be mope deplorable than
that sectarian bickerings, respecting infinitesimal points in the
sanctions of morality, should result in the children of England
receiving hardly any moral instruction whatever. Conduct, as the late
Mr. Matthew Arnold has so often told us, is three fourths of life.
What are we to think of an educational system which officially ignores
this; what have we to hope in the way of improvement from a people
which consents to its being ignored?

But even a course of systematic instruction in the principles of
conduct, no matter by what sanctions these principles are inculcated,
will not avail much unless they are to some extent practised in the
home. And this will never be the case so long as women are demoralised
by the hard conditions of industrial life, and unfitted for the duties
of motherhood before beginning to undertake them.

In addition to this, no State will ever get rid of the criminal
problem unless its population is composed of healthy and vigorous
citizens. Very often crime is but the offspring of degeneracy and
disease. A diseased and degenerate population, no matter how
favourably circumstanced in other respects, will always produce a
plentiful crop of criminals. Stunted and decrepit faculties, whether
physical or mental, either vitiate the character, or unfit the
combatant for the battle of life. In both cases the result is in
general the same, namely, a career of crime.

As to the best method of dealing with the actual criminal, the first
thing to be done is to know what sort of a person you are dealing
with. He must be carefully studied at first hand. At present too much
attention is bestowed on theoretical discussions respecting the
various kinds of crime and punishment, while hardly any account is
taken of the persons who commit the crime and require the punishment.
Yet this is the most important point of all; the other is trivial in
comparison with it. If crime is to be dealt with in a rational manner
and not on mere _a priori_ grounds, our minds must be enlightened on
such questions as the following: What is the Criminal? What are the
chi