experience of the most advanced countries confirms this by the
beneficent and preventive influence of criminal legislation resting on
efficacious social reforms.

We arrive, then, at this scientific conclusion: In the society of the
future, the necessity for penal justice will be reduced to the extent
that social justice grows intensively and extensively.


III.

In the preceding two lectures, I have given you a short review of the
new current in scientific thought, which studies the painful and
dangerous phenomena of criminality. We must now draw the logical
conclusions, in theory and practice, from the teachings of experimented
science, for the removal of the gangrenous plague of crime. Under the
influence of the positive methods of research, the old formula "Science
for science's sake" has given place to the new formula "Science for
life's sake." For it would be useless for the human mind to retreat into
the vault of philosophical concentration, if this intellectual mastery
did not produce as a counter-effect a beneficent wave of real
improvement in the destinies of the human race.

What, then, has the civilized world to offer in the way of remedies
against criminality? The classic school of criminology, being unable to
locate in the course of its scientific and historical mission the
natural causes of crime, as I have shown in the preceding lectures, was
not in a position to deal in a comprehensive and far-seeing manner with
this problem of the remedy against criminality. Some of the classic
criminologists, such as Bentham, Romagnosi, or Ellero, with a more