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last few years it has become the practice when a convict with no previous record of crime is released on licence to ascertain after a short period how he has conducted himself. If he has behaved well and is living honestly, the obligation to report himself to the police (which is the restriction that most comes home to licence-holders) is remitted. The editor states that the result of these inquiries is almost invariably satisfactory. It should be remembered, of course, that they are only made in the case of convicts of previous good character, but even so the figures are encouraging. They show, in the first place, that penal servitude can hardly be the crushing and demoralizing infliction which it is sometimes represented as being, since the vast majority of those persons not habitual criminals who have been sentenced to it are found by experience to profit by their lesson, and to return on leaving prison to a respectable way of life.

It also throws some light on a complaint which is frequently heard that the police exercise their supervision over licenceholders in such a way as to prevent them from obtaining an honest living. Sometimes the complainants go further, and say that the police worry the returned convict into crime, in order to make work for themselves and appear to justify their existence. And these charges have produced a considerable effect upon popular opinion. In this connection these figures are extremely interesting. The inquiries of which the editor speaks are of course made of the police of the district where each licence-holder resides. Seeing, then, that the answers of the police to these inquiries are with very few exceptions favourable, it seems to follow clearly enough that police supervision does not operate to prevent a man who has once fallen into crime from retrieving his character if he wishes to try, and that the police can hardly have much prejudice against licence-holders, or their reports would not be so uniformly favourable. As a matter of fact, the habitual criminal has a certain stock of rhetorical commonplaces, which he makes

use of for his defence according to circumstances. If he is not arrested in the act, he complains that his identification by the prosecutor was unfairly managed by the police. If his conviction is for frequenting with intent, or anything of that kind, he says that he is suffering, not for anything he has done, but solely on account of his previous convictions. And if he is re-convicted during the currency of a licence, he says that police persecution prevented him from getting work. The criminal does not, as a rule, invent new and original defences; he prefers old and tried pleas. Mr. Weller, senior, was of course far from being a criminal; but his belief that an alibi was the only sound line of defence in all circumstances is a mental attitude very characteristic of the habitual criminal. And the popular belief in police persecution of licence-holders is largely due to the fact that this particular plea has obtained a general currency which the rest of the stock have not.

There is another interesting point about Table LII. (exercise of the Prerogative of Mercy). Out of 414 cases in which remissions were granted in 1897, only twelve were given on grounds affecting the original sentence, i.e. because the prisoners' guilt appeared to be doubtful. The popular view of the Home Office is that it is constantly engaged in determining the correctness or otherwise of convictions. This is a hasty generalization from the Maybrick case. The natural inference from the fact that remissions on grounds affecting the correctness of the conviction are so rare, while the vast majority (sixty-eight per cent.) are given “in simple mitigation of sentence," is that the length of sentences is frequently revised, but that cases where there is real doubt of the prisoner's guilt form an exceedingly small proportion of those considered.

Nearly all the remaining cases (twenty-five per cent.) are cases of remission on medical grounds. This sounds alarming, but it must not be supposed that one quarter of the

remissions are due to prisoners' health breaking down in prison. Nearly fifty per cent. of these cases of remission on medical grounds are simply those of women who have received short terms of imprisonment for petty offences, and are released before their time in order that they may not bear children in prison. And in twenty per cent. of the remainder the disease which necessitated remission was contracted before the prisoner entered prison (see the Report of the Prison Commissioners for 1897, p. 73).

There is one other point in the Statistics which calls for some notice. This year, a Table (No. XXXIX.) has been added, showing the number of prisoners detained in prison after committal for trial and the length of detention. Only about one-fifth of the total number committed were released on bail, and of the remaining four-fifths no less than 1481, or over sixteen per cent., were detained for more than eight weeks. Thirteen were detained for over sixteen weeks, and 213 of those detained were ultimately acquitted. These figures are very unpleasant reading, especially when we consider how serious a matter long detention before trial must be to a poor man, in preventing him from supporting his family, exhausting what resources he may have, and making it a matter of the greatest difficulty to procure evidence. Unfortunately such figures as are available for comparison, go to show that the proportion of persons bailed out is decreasing, and the proportion of long detentions is increasing. The only reassuring consideration which can be put forward, is that the Bail Act of last year gives greater facilities for admitting defendants to bail, and there is therefore reason to hope that in the future fewer persons will be detained in prison to await their trial.

V. THE MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE OF

THE

INSANITY.

HE recent work of Dr. Clevenger of Chicago* is, we think, the largest and most exhaustive treatise on this subject yet published. The author, or his legal editor, upon whom part of the labour has devolved, has shown commendable patience in endeavouring to reduce to some kind of order the chaotic mass of American judicial decisions on the subject of insanity. Yet we cannot say that the value of the work is in proportion to its size. The author's style is rambling and often involved, and the book is loaded with discursive remarks on totally irrelevant subjects. It is interesting, however, as a type of the class of medico-legal treatises to which Dr. Isaac Ray in America, and Dr. Maudsley in this country, are the most distinguished contributors. Dr. Clevenger is a professed disciple of Ray, and takes every opportunity of quoting with approval his well-known work, now more than sixty years old.

In his opening paragraph our author strikes the key-note of the system. He says, "Precisely as the exactness of

modern research in the field of mental disease is demonstrated to intelligent jurists, so will there be improvement of the common and statutory laws relative to insanity" (p. 1). We take this to mean that every change in the medical view of insanity must be accompanied by a corresponding change in legal responsibility. In other words, every departure from the normal, which justifies a medical man in declaring a person insane, absolves that quences of a criminal act. meaning is shown elsewhere. term 'responsibility' means

person from the legal conseThat this is Dr. Clevenger's He says, "In criminal law the liability to legal punishment;

See ante, p. 235.

and as the law holds that the insane are not responsible, the entire matter of responsibility is merged in the question, Who is and who is not insane?" (p. 113). That all insane persons are legally irresponsible is clearly untrue, unless the term "insanity" is divorced from its ordinary and medical sense, and used (as it generally is in law) to indicate the line of legal responsibility. The class of medical men referred to treat two distinct meanings as interchangeable. When they refer to the results of medical experience, insanity means any divergence from an abstract and imaginary normal state of sanity; when they proceed to expose the anomalies of existing law, insanity means that particular extent of divergence which the law regards as sufficient to exculpate. When the question is directly faced, our author fully recognizes the distinction. Thus, in chapter vii., he says, "The mere fact that a person is insane does not per se relieve him from criminal responsibility. A slight departure from a well-balanced mind cannot be recognized as insanity in the administration of the criminal law, though it might be pronounced insanity in medical science. It is not medical but legal insanity which is required to relieve from criminal responsibility" (p. 125). Our objection is that, in common with Dr. Ray, Dr. Maudsley, and others of the sentimental school of criminologists, our author denounces the administration of the law on grounds which are only applicable to insanity in its medical sense. The burden of their argument is, that medical men having declared insanity to exist, the law nevertheless proceeds to perpetrate a judicial murder. In this connection we are not told which of the two meanings is attached to the word "insanity." The syllogism is therefore vitiated by an ambiguous premiss from which no logical conclusion can be drawn.

Writers such as Dr. Clevenger view the law only from the standpoint of medicine, and ignore the true object of legal punishment, which is the safety and security of society. No

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