J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 221 



The general line of evolution of our modern penal systems is thus 

 clear. First of all we have purely vindictive action on the part of the 

 injured individual. Then there is some sort of legalising — if we may use 

 that word — of retributive action on the part of the injured, so long as this 

 retributive action does not go beyond the limits of ' justice,' this being 

 regulated by social law. Finally, recognising that punishment has a 

 protective function as far as social life is concerned, society itself 

 takes over the infliction of punishment, and a penal system is 

 inaugurated. This stage or phase is the protective or deterrent stage 

 or phase. 



To leave the matter thus, however, would be to obscure important 

 aspects and phases of the actual course of events, and could not fail to 

 produce a misleading impression of the facts. Stages in social evolution 

 are never clear-cut. Thus the development of the retributive view of 

 punishment by no means involved the discontinuance in practice of 

 vindictive punishment. Still less did the realisation of protection as the 

 primary social function of punishment alter the practice which had been 

 founded on the older and more primitive conceptions. Practice lagged a 

 long way behind theory in this, as in so many other cases. The psycho- 

 logical explanation of the actual facts would appear to be that the crude 

 emotion of anger remained the driving force behind punishment, though 

 it was cloaked and obscured by other motives, and by various forms of 

 rationalisation. After all, the reaction of anger is a natural reaction to 

 an act which society agrees in reprobating. One leading authority on 

 criminal law has, indeed, placed on record his conviction that it is ' highly 

 desirable that criminals should be hated, that the punishments inflicted 

 upon them should be so contrived as to give expression to that hatred, 

 and to justify it so far as the public provision of means for expressing 

 and gratifying a healthy natural sentiment can justify and encourage it.' 

 I am afraid the learned author's thoughts have become somewhat mixed 

 up in the latter portion of this statement. It sounds as if his rationalisa- 

 tion were not very satisfactory, even to himself. However that may be, 

 it is certain that the realisation by society in theory that the function of 

 punishment from the point of view of society was primarily protective 

 did not prevent an almost religious sanction continuing to be attached 

 to the lex talionis — ' an eye for an eye.' This remained, in fact, an assump- 

 tion at the base of all penal systems which no one seriously challenged. 

 And it is equally certain that the protective function of punishment was 

 frequently made the excuse, as in the writer just quoted, for continuing 

 the practice of vindictive punishment — ' for deterrent purposes ' was the 

 usual rationalisation — even when it was quite evident that the psycho- 

 logical situation thus produced was often quite inimical to the ends sought. 

 One need only instance the brutalising influence of capital punishment on 

 society at large, and its inevitable tendency to increase the frequency of 

 the crime of murder, during the period when it was the punishment also 

 for less serious crimes, to show the kind of psychological situation which 

 was created. Curiously enough the humaner — and, indeed, saner — attitude 

 and practice of modern times in civilised countries were due far less to 

 recognition of the fact that vindictive punishment for deterrent purposes 

 was frequently an entire failure, than to the fact that the infliction of 



