the conflict of motives punishment serves a useful purpose from the point of view of society. It adds to the checks in the direction of preventing crime where the will is weak. This may be true and yet supply no ethical justification. It hardly advances matters to say: "If it be the clerk's nature to embezzle money, it is society's nature to put embezzlers in gaol." It was society's nature a few years ago to burn, boil, and break on the wheel, and it is still its nature to hang and to flog. Government of the weak-willed by terrorism may be preventive of certain ills, but is no ultimate, or even immediate, solution. The evils it creates are worse than those it prevents.

Dr. Hollander divides criminals into three groups: (a) the typical professional; (b) the accidental; (c) the mentally diseased. We need not quarrel over the word

professional," though it would surely be better to speak of born criminals, since what is meant is a type of low physical and moral sensibility, born in criminal surroundings. Some of these unfortunates are apparently incurable, others may be reclaimed by proper treatment. The accidental criminal is the product of adverse social and economic causes, more sinned against by society than sinning.

"The rush of life, the competitive system, exciting pleasure, morbid literature, the wealth of the wealthy, the poverty of the poor, the frightful overcrowding of the masses, the continuous labour of married women-working right up to the day of their delivery and working again within a week of their confinement-all these things help to call into life not only a race of beings who have neither moral nor physical strength, but also a large number of individuals who are subject to strange whims, delusions, and uncontrollable impulses."

Here, of course, the cure lies outside, much more than inside, the penal institution.

But it is the mentally diseased that provide the most

damning indictment against our present system of social life. "One in every 126 prisoners is certified to be insane, and 12.5 per cent. are shown to come of insane or epileptic parents"-which is what we might expect when we learn that one in every eighty of the 40,000 children in Manchester's schools is found to be feeble-minded, and, having been specially educated up to the age of sixteen, is turned adrift to become in too many cases a degenerate and a criminal.

These special schools for the mentally deficient are termed by the ordinary school-children, the silly schools, because of the unfortunates who attend them. Under the circumstances there is a certain appropriateness in the name.

Against the legal view of insanity Dr. Hollander very justly protests. That the knowledge of the right or wrong of an act should be taken as the test of insanity, and therefore of responsibility, is certainly monstrous. The lunatic knows perfectly well the difference between right and wrong. It is this very knowledge that often drives him to despair and the doing of some fearful act. It is not "knowing the nature of an act," but power of control, that proves sanity. And, of course, the whole conception of a hard-and-fast line between the sane and the insane, though held to by the lawyers, has long been given up by the doctors. "Persons are to be met with of all stages between the normal and the profoundly insane." And in the stage just over the legal line are large numbers of criminals whose insanity is proved after conviction. In how many crimes of murder might this not be the case if we were not so sure of their responsibility and did not lead them to the gallows?

Dr. Hollander illustrates his points by cases which have come under his care. Hence his paper constitutes a valuable addition to humanitarian literature dealing with crime. He abundantly justifies his remark that he has quoted "enough evidence to show that crime calls for intelligent and scientific treatment," and that the public

will look in the future to physicians for "the differential diagnosis between the curable and the incurable criminal."

The two pamphlets from the Penal Reform League deal with the "Indeterminate Sentence" and with "Discipline." Captain St. John gives some interesting information with regard to the carrying out of the indeterminate sentence in the States of New York and Indiana. There can be no dispute with the remark that the "crux of the whole question evidently is whether we can make sure that the treatment of criminals shall be really reformative. If this could be confidently relied on," etc. If! But what guarantee could we possibly have under present conditions; until, that is, we entirely alter our attitude towards crime? It is quite easy to understand the authorities of the New York State Reformatory thinking that they could do better "with the indefinite sentence in its entirety-that is, without the maximum limit." Others will be inclined to believe that human liberty is too important a factor in social life to be left to the decision of any Board of officials —at least, for as long as punishment remains as the chief item in penal treatment.

In America the reformative method is being applied to adults as well as to youths; and this, an extension of the Borstal System, is the most hopeful line that can be pursued in England. There is nothing hopeful in Mr. Gladstone's Preventive Detention. As a French professor replied when asked as to the object of a certain police form which had to be filled in by his foreign guest: "C'est pour aider Messieurs les voleurs, comme ça ils sont toujours dans l'ordre." The old scoundrels will know how to get round Preventive Detention as they now know how to get round the prison rules by so-called good conduct and assiduous attendance at Holy Communion. The better type will suffer.

In the paper on "Discipline" one is glad to read a quotation from the Report of the Elmira prison to the effect that

66

Formerly in this institution there was corporal punishment. . . The objection to it was not so much that harm was done to the individual who suffered it, but that the rest of the population, never in a state of very stable mental equilibrium, were stirred up by it and kept in a state of unrest, rendering the development of relations of confidence and regard between them and the officers of the institution difficult or impossible. Five years ago it was entirely abolished."

One cannot pretend to have much sympathy with the odd suggestion made in this pamphlet on "Discipline," that "corrective institutions might be classified by religions or denominations." Given a broad definition of the term religious, it may be agreed that "our criminal discipline should be administered by religious and moral men." But from denominational prisons-" Church of England, Dissent, or 'oly Roman "-Good Lord, deliver us! Let us keep to a national, or rather to a human, basis.

Instead of cutting prisoners off as much as possible from the outside world and its interests, Captain St. John would do everything to bring them into closer touch with its better and more wholesome influences, and all thinking folk will surely agree with him. The greatest fault of all in our prison system is its dense stupidity, its souldestroying, mind-destroying system, which turns out strongly developed animals of inhibited mental and psychical capacity. Thus Sir Edmund Du Cane, then Chairman of the Prisons Commissioners, could tell the Departmental Committee of 1895 that he did not know that he should dare to propose to teach prisoners music and singing. The cat" as treatment for abnormal minds is apparently a matter of course, but to suggest music to our intelligent managers of prisons requireswell, daring!

A hopeful sign in connection with the criminal problem is the energetic way in which it is being taken up and forced on the consideration of the thoughtful public. If the advance be but slow, it is an advance-as anyone can observe who will work at this problem for a few years.

CARL HEATH.

BIG-GAME BUTCHERY.

66 Once, late one evening in 1873, I shot a white rhinoceros cow that had a smallish calf, which, however, I thought was large enough to fend for itself and get its own living. That night, after having cut off all the best and fattest meat of the rhinoceros, we camped some two hundred yards from the carcass, which lay in an open valley close to a pool of water. Soon after dark the hyænas began to collect for the feast, and whether the calf returned to its mother's remains and the hyænas forthwith attacked it, or whether it resented their presence and first attacked them, I do not know; but we first heard it snorting and squealing like a pig, and for half the night it was rushing about, closely pursued by some of the hyenas, which, I fancy, must have been hanging on to its ears and any other part they could get hold of. Twice the young rhinoceros charged almost into our camp, squealing lustily. Finally the hyænas killed it, and had left hardly anything of it the next morning. I shall never forget the extraordinary noises these animals made that night."

"the

One would have thought that what Mr. F. C. Selous, the great hunter-from whose recent work, "African Nature Notes," the above very unpleasant passage is taken-would "never forget" was the agony of the "smallish calf" whose mother had been killed by him, and whom he appears (from his own account) to have left with much unconcern to a very dreadful fate; but he tells the story as merely affording an interesting instance of "the howl of the hyæna." Let us say a few words about his book, as the latest product of that gospel of the Expanding Bullet, of which he has been so skilled and diligent a missionary.

We have every desire to speak fairly of Mr. Selous, who took so honourable a part in opposing the shameful treatment of the Boers, and who is understood to have at least an open mind as regards the morality of certain artificial forms of "sport." To do him justice, it must be said that his courage, skill, and hardihood distinguish him as a sportsman from the less adventurous persons who seek

*Macmillan and Co., 1908.