The tortures, which we incorrectly ascribe to the mental brutality of
the judges of those times, were but a logical consequence of the
contemporaneous theories. It was felt that in order to condemn a man,
one must have the certainty of his guilty, and it was said that the best
means of obtaining tins certainty, the queen of proofs, was the
confession of the criminal. And if the criminal denied his guilt, it was
necessary to have recourse to torture, in order to force him to a
confession which he withheld from fear of the penalty. The torture
soothed, so to say, the conscience of the judge, who was free to condemn
as soon as he had obtained a confession. Cesare Beccaria rose with
others against the torture. Thereupon the judges and jurists protested
that penal justice would be impossible, because it could not get any
information, since a man suspected of a crime would not confess his
guilt voluntarily. Hence they accused Beccaria of being the protector of
robbers and murderers, because he wanted to abolish the only means of
compelling them to a confession, the torture. But Cesare Beccaria had on
his side the magic power of truth. He was truly the electric accumulator
of his time, who gathered from its atmosphere the presage of the coming
revolution, the stirring of the human conscience. You can find a similar
illustration in the works of Daquin in Savoy, of Pinel in France, and of
Hach Take in England, who strove to bring about a revolution in the
treatment of the insane. This episode interests us especially, because
it is a perfect illustration of the way traveled by the positive school
of criminology. The insane were likewise considered to blame for their
insanity. At the dawn of the 19th century, the physician Hernroth still
wrote that insanity was a moral sin of the insane, because "no one
becomes insane, unless he forsakes the straight path of virtue and of
the fear of the Lord."