ed
in vain, like the thirsty traveller at the sight of the desert mirage,
the advocates of the Modern School came to the conclusion that sentences
should show a decrease in infamy and ferocity proportionate to the
increase in length and social safety. In lieu of infamy they substituted
a longer period of segregation, and for cases in which alienists were
unable to decide between criminality and insanity, they advocated an
intermediate institution, in which merciful treatment and social
security were alike considered. They also emphasised the importance of
certain measures which hitherto had been universally regarded as a pure
abstraction or an unattainable desideratum--measures for the prevention
of crime by tracing it to its source, divorce laws to diminish adultery,
legislation of an anti-alcoholistic tendency to prevent crimes of
violence, associations for destitute children, and co-operative
associations to check the tendency to theft. Above all, they insisted on
those regulations--unfortunately fallen into disuse--which indemnify the
victim at the expense of the aggressor, in order that society, having
suffered once for the crime, should not be obliged to suffer
pecuniarily for the detention of the offender, solely in homage to a
theoretical principle that no one believes in, according to which prison
is a kind of baptismal font in whose waters sin of all kinds is washed
away.

Thus the edifice of criminal anthropology, circumscribed at first,
gradually extended its walls and embraced special studies on homicide,
political crime, crimes connected with the banking world, crimes by
women, etc.

But the first stone had been scarcely laid when from all quarters of
Europe arose those calumnies and misrepresentations which always follow
in the train of audacious innovations. We were accused of wishing to
proclaim the impunity of crime, of demanding the release of all
criminals, of refusing to take into account climatic and racial
influences and of asserting that the criminal is a slave eternally
chained to his instincts; whereas the Modern School, on the contrary,
gave a powerful impetus to the labors of statisticians and sociologists
on these very matters. This is clearly shown in the third volume of
_Criminal Man_, which contains a summary of the ideas of modern
criminologists and my own.

One nation, however--America,--gave a warm and sympathetic reception to
the ideas of the Modern School which they speedily put