250 Proceedings of the Royal SocieUj of Victoria. 



then must be deterrent, while all punishment should be 

 inflicted with a view to the ultimate reform of the 

 criminal, bearing in mind that in order to secure refor- 

 mation tlie conscience of the criminal must be awakened. 

 He must be brought to see that his punishment is 

 just before we could hope for any betterment. In 

 " The Criminal," by Havelock Ellis, one could not fail 

 to be struck with the mass of evidence gathered in the 

 biological and pathological examination of the criminal. 

 But it must be observed that a fair examination of the 

 evidence led to the opinion that the bulk of what were 

 called criminal physiological characteristics were also to be 

 met with in the non-criminal and respectable classes, while 

 many of the so-called criminal characteristics were due to 

 the professional exercise of crime. Lombrosa had been 

 often cited as the greatest living exponent of criminal 

 anthropology, yet he was called rash and unscientific. Ellis 

 spoke of his work as " by no means free from faults. His 

 style was abnipt ; he was too impetuous, arriving too 

 quickly at conclusions, lacking in critical faculty and in 

 balance. Thus at an early date he was led to over-estimate 

 the atavistic element in the criminal, and at a later date he 

 has pressed too strongly the epileptic affinities of crime." 

 Yet this was the authority who was often quoted, especially 

 by medical witnesses who advocated irresponsibility of the 

 criminal. Of all his vast mass of in vestigiition, extending to 

 about 3(),()()0 cases, Lombrosa himself had declared that 

 " perhaps not one stone would remain upon another, but 

 that, if this was to be the fate of his work, a better 

 edifice would arise in its place." To illustrate the 

 length to which enthusiastic specialists w^ould go in 

 advocating their own views, l)espine, who wrote a 

 good work in 1868, " Psychologic Naturelle," had con- 

 sidered the criminal as " morally mad," and therefore 

 irresponsible, and had said, " No physiologist had yet 

 occupied himself with the insanity of the sane." Was 

 not this evidence of the "illusions of enthusiasm?" We 

 might treat the question of responsibility from an ethical, 

 a metaphysical, a clinical, or a practical point of view, 

 and we must arrive at the conclusion that sane or 

 insane, eveiy criminal must, for the protection of society, 

 be treated as responsible. He had been asked to say 

 something on the treatment of the criminal, but he 

 thought that hardly came within the scope of the 



