dealing with habitual offenders, vagrants, and juveniles. As far
as the suppression of vagrancy is concerned the members of the
committee are unanimously of opinion that ``the severest
enactments of the general law are futile, and that the best
results have been obtained by the milder provisions of more recent
statutes.'' They also speak of the ``utter inadequacy of the
present system in all the variety of detail which it offers to
deter the habitual offender from a course of life which devolves
the cost of his maintenance on the prison and the poorhouse when
he is not preying directly on the public.'' The committee state
that they have had testimony from a large number of witnesses
supporting the view that ``long sentences of imprisonment effect
no good result,'' and they arrive at the conclusion that to double
the present sentences would not diminish the number of habitual
offenders. In this conclusion they are at one with the views of
the Royal Commission on Penal Servitude, which acquiesced in the
objection to the penal servitude system on the ground that it
``not only fails to reform offenders, but in the case of the less
hardened criminals and especially first offenders produces a
deteriorating effect.'' A similar opinion was recently expressed
by the Prisons Committee presided over by Mr. Herbert Gladstone.
As soon as punishment reaches a point at which it makes
men worse than they were before, it becomes useless as an
instrument of reformation or social defence.

The proper method of arriving at a more or less satisfactory
solution of the criminal problem is to inquire into the causes
which are producing the criminal population, and to institute
remedies based upon the results of such an inquiry. Professor
Ferri's volume has this object in view. The first chanter, on the