that ``crime is a fact dependent upon law, an infraction rather
than an action,'' he deduced--and that by the sheer force of an
admirable logic--a complete symmetrical scheme of legal and
abstract consequences, wherein judges are compelled, whether they
like it or not, to determine the position of every criminal who
comes before them.

But now the classical school, which sprang from the marvellous
little work of Beccaria, has completed its historic cycle. It has
yielded all it could, and writers of the present day who still
cling to it can only recast the old material. The youngest of
them, indeed, are condemned to a sort of Byzantine discussion of
scholastic formulas, and to a sterile process of scientific
rumination.

And meantime, outside our universities and academies, criminality
continues to grow, and the punishments hitherto inflicted, though
they can neither protect nor indemnify the honest, succeed in
corrupting and degrading evil-doers. And whilst our treatises and
codes (which are too often mere treatises cut up into segments)
lose themselves in the fog of their legal abstractions, we feel
more strongly every day, in police courts and at assizes, the
necessity for those biological and sociological studies of crime
and criminals which, when logically directed, can throw light as
nothing else can upon the administration of
the penal law.



CHAPTER I.