at we
shall succeed in eliminating all forms of criminality. Hence, if a crime
manifests itself, repression may be employed as one of the remedies of
criminology, but it should be the very last, not the exclusively
dominating one, as it is today.

It is this blind worship of punishment which is to blame for the
spectacle which we witness in every modern country, the spectacle that
the legislators neglect the rules of social hygiene and wake up with a
start when some form of crime becomes acute, and that they know of no
better remedy than an intensification of punishment meeted out by the
penal code. If one year of imprisonment is not enough, we'll make it ten
years, and if an aggravation of the ordinary penalty is not enough,
we'll pass a law of exception. It is always the blind trust in
punishment which remains the only remedy of the public conscience and
which always works to the detriment of morality and material welfare,
because it does not save the society of honest people and strikes
without curing those who have fallen a prey to guilt and crime.

The positive school of criminology, then, aside from the greater value
attributed to daily and systematic measures of social hygiene for the
prevention of criminality, comes to radically different conclusions also
in the matter of repressive justice. The classic school has for a
cardinal remedy against crime a preference for one kind of punishment,
namely imprisonment, and gives fixed and prescribed doses of this
remedy. It is the logical conclusion of retributive justice that it
travels by way of an illusory purification from moral guilt to the legal
responsibility of the criminal and thence on to a corresponding dose of
punishment, which has been previously prescribed and fixed.

We, on the other hand, hold that even the surviving form of repression,
which will be inevitable in spite of the application of the rules of
social prevention, should be widely different, on account of the
different conception which we have of crime and of penal justice.

In the majority of cases composed of minor crimes committed by people
belonging to the most numerous and least dangerous class of occasional
or passionate criminals, the only form of civil repression will be _the
compensation of the victim for his loss_. According to us, this should
he the only form of penalty imposed in the majority of minor crimes
committed by people who are not dangerous. In the present practice of
jus