Excerpt from The Rationale of Punishment
At the present time, when the State punishment of crime is constantly cited before the tribunal of science in order to show cause why it should not be eliminated, like other relics of barbarism, from the arsenal of modem civilization, in which there is no room for mere superstitions of the past, a critical investigation of the problem of punishment cannot be out of place. The new doctrine has already succeeded in insinuating some of its minor canons into more than one legislative system, and whilst it must be conceded that the measures hitherto adopted under its influence, such as the probation of first offenders, conditional sentences, and conditional liberation of prisoners, have all proved highly beneficial, the more extravagant claims of the criminological school threaten to subvert the very foundations of the rampart which society has laboriously erected against the onslaughts of crime. Indeed, one shudders at the mere thought that the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years may be sacrificed, in a few years of revolutionary experiments, on the altar of a fashionable and self-complacent, withal utterly unverified, hypothesis.
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