which this excuse is offered, with 'damnable iteration,' by a young man who had succumbed to the attractions of frail beauty: For I really couldn't help it,

Couldn't help it, couldn't help it,

For I really couldn't help it

She was such a charming girl.

And of this kind is the excuse which the theory of Determinism supplies for any lapse from right action: My will was not free. The temptation was too strong. I couldn't help myself.' According to this doctrine, crime is not morally wrong, or, to speak more accurately, it does not exist. The distinction between right and wrong, in the old and only rational sense of the word, is obliterated. It is not wrong for a man to do what he cannot help doing. Larceny becomes kleptomania. The so-called thief is merely a sufferer from a mental malady. I am far from denying that kleptomania really exists, although the word was ridiculed by some of our best Judges when it first came in. Thus, when counsel in a case before Mr. Justice Byles, setting it up as a defence, inquired 'Your Lordship has heard of that disease'? the Judge replied, 'Yes, and I have been sent here to cure it.' In the present day I suppose no one would deny that there are cases of vitiated volition which renders a man incapable of self control in respect of his neighbour's goods. But such cases are rare. And to account of all crime as merely disease, which is what a certain school seeks to do, is perfectly monstrous, and strikes at the bonds of society. If moral responsibility does not exist, criminal law is a gigantic iniquity. If the imperious dictate of conscience Thou oughtest,' does not imply 'Thou can'st,' conscience is a delusion, nay, a mockery. But to tell me that, is to contradict the surest of all my certitudes. The arguments for Determinism look extremely well on paper, although they are often vitiated by ignorance of the subtle, but most necessary distinctions drawn by metaphysicians from Aristotle down to Kant. For myself I quite admit that the

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In treating de actibus humanis we distinguish between different kinds of freedom. A deed may be free, and therefore deliberate, actu, habitu, virtute, or interpretative. Of course no one can rationally deny that most of men's daily actions are indeliberate as M. Bergson puts it, we speak rather than think, we are acted rather than act ourselves.' But there are cases when we make up our mind deliberately there are cases where we choose to use again M. Bergson's words-' in defiance of what is conventionally called a motive; and this absence of any tangible reason is the more striking the deeper our freedom goes.' Bismarck, as Lord Morley of Blackburn has recently told us, testified of himself, I have often noticed that my will has decided before my thinking was finished.' I should like to reproduce here, in compressed form, certain observations which I have made elsewhere:

The objections urged at the present day against freedom of volition are no new discovery. They come before us decked in the garb of modern science. But there is not one of them, of any real weight, which was not met and

problem how the will is free is insoluble. It transcends the grasp of speculative philosophy. But the fact of freedom of volition seems to me conclusively evinced by certain practical principles. I have, however, no intention of inflicting upon my readers a metaphysical discussion. The vast majority of men are not metaphysicians, happily for them. But they are quite capable of appreciating the dictates of the practical reason which witnesses to the limited and conditioned freedom of the human will. 'Sir,' said Dr. Johnson, we know that our will is free, and there's an end of it.' This is, at all events, sufficient as a rule of life. It is a fact that men possess, in greater or less degree, the faculty of choosing that which reason, independently of natural inclination, declares to be practically necessary or good. And this means free will, which is an absolutely essential condition of morality. Without it duty, obligation, responsibility, merit, cannot exist.

So much as to the true conception of crime. What is the true rationale of punishment? I suppose the vast majority of people would reply, to deter and to reform. Now I am far from denying that these are ends of punishment, although I cannot admit that they are its only ends. I consider that it has another end, of which I shall speak hereafter. That punishment is, and is intended to be, deterrent, who can doubt? The words of Aristotle are as true of our time as of his: It is not

sufficiently answered by the Schoolmen centuries ago. What is commonly accounted the most formidable argument for Determinism is derived from the doctrine of evolution, now so generally accepted. I confess I do not understand why it is thus accounted. The question whether, and in what sense, a consciousness of right has been evolved, seems to me to present no special difficulties. Evolution of the organism is required, up to a certain degree, for the senses to act. But we do not call the organism the efficient cause either of sense or perception. Another kind of material and social evolution may be indispensable for the exercise of the hitherto dormant moral faculty. But how does it follow that such evolution is the true cause, and not merely a conditio sine qua non? The truth is that these disputants have not the least notion of the nature of intellect. Here we come to the real issue. The School of which I am speaking will have it that the intellect is nothing more than a bundle of associations : 'the aggregate of feelings and ideas, active and nascent, which there exists,' Mr. Spencer assures us. And so Dr. Bain: The collective "I" or "self" can be nothing different from the feelings, actions, and intelligence of the individual.' 'Can be nothing different!' It is an admirable example of 'affirmativeness in negation.' I venture, nevertheless, to maintain that it can be, and is, something very different. I maintain that the intellect is, in fact, a power of perception and judgment sui generis: that the unity of consciousness, the Ichheit of the Ego, the selfhood of the Me, is the original and ultimate fact of man's existence and that the will is ego-agens (First Principles in Politics, p. 277).

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It is a commonplace of the Schools Liberum arbitrium habetur quando positis ad agendum requisitis potest quis agere vel non agere.' Of course there are cases of a non-physical necessity, of a single determining motive, of a spiritual instinct, of a knowledge exhibiting the object as omni ex parte bonum, where free will does not exist.

the nature of the bulk of men to obey from a sense of shame but from fear: nor do they abstain from evil because it is wrong, but from dread of punishment.' But of punishment as a reformatory agent we must speak with much dubiety. Reformation really means the conversion of a man's will from wrong to right. Is that likely to be accomplished by turning him into a jail bird,' as the phrase is? Will intercourse with his fellowprisoners, the scum of the earth and the offscouring of all men,' aid in the process? Or will the torture of solitary confinement? A powerful writer of fiction well puts it that prison life, with its manifold degradations, eating into a man's flesh, becoming infused into his blood, and running for ever through his veins, seems fitter to quench all sense of personality, and so to destroy the very foundation upon which character must be built up. And experience warrants this view. A prison is not, as it is sometimes called, ‘a moral hospital.' No: it is rather a criminal manufactory. The theory of which we hear so much, that an educative process,' worked chiefly through good conduct marks, takes place in our prisons, a process whereby the convicts are led, by calculations of profit and loss, to resolve to cease from conduct destructive of agreeable feeling to society generally, is contradicted by facts. An educative process does indeed go on within those gloomy walls. The contamination of prison life is an education in crime. It is said that three-fourths-I believe 80 per cent. is a truer estimate of those who are sent to prison return thither.

That there is a reformatory agent in our jails I quite admit. That reformatory agent is the Chaplain. It is a dictum of an eminent Nonconformist divine, Dr. Bushnell, who was a veritable apostle of the worst criminals, that the soul of all reformation is the reformation of the soul.' I believe that dictum to be profoundly true. The only means of really reforming prisoners is by the alteration of their will from bad to good: you may call it a change of heart, or a transformation by the renewing of the mind and as a matter of fact this is ordinarily effected through religious influences brought to bear upon them by the Chaplain. Now let us consider for a moment how those influences are brought to bear. The Chaplain is the minister of a religion based upon the truths of man's free will and moral accountability which have their sanction in the individual conscience. And it is to the conscience of the prisoner that he appeals. The religion of which he is the representative has for its mission to convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment-but there can be no sin, no righteousness, no judgment, if man, lying helplessly in an infinite eternal network of cause and effect, possesses no freedom of volition, and incurs no consequent responsibility; nor can he possibly have any retribution to fear

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if he has no real choice to do good or evil. That doctrine is, however, the very antithesis of the doctrine which the minister of Christ has to preach: nay, he must needs regard it as a doctrine of devils, striking at the very root of repentance, of moral and spiritual restoration. It is on conscience that the Chaplain founds himself it is to its dictates that he appeals, and to the conviction of guiltiness which it enforces. To reverence his conscience as his King' is the very beginning of a man's real reformation: yes, and is its end also. Assuredly the Chaplain does not approach the convict with the mealy-mouthed philan thropies so much in vogue: the sick sentimentalism which we suck in with our whole nourishment and get ingrained into the very blood of us, in these miserable times,' as Carlyle puts it. He does not assert that the wretched inmates of the house of bondage could not help themselves; that they are the victims of abnormality, the product of bad laws and of bad institutions, the outcome of social injustice. No his it is to insist upon the very different teaching that 'out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.' He apprehends the great truth, so well insisted on by the International Prison Congress in 1872, the prisoner must be taught that he has sinned against society and owes reparation' that his punishment is the other half of his crime: that it is a merited retribution which he has justly earned: the vengeance which according to the everlasting law of righteousness overtakes the wrongdoer.

'Vengeance!' does anyone demur? I seem to hear the misused text Vengeance is mine, I will repay saith the Lord.' Precisely. These words, which, it will be remembered, proscribe private revenge-Avenge not yourselves '-are most opportune for my purpose. Vengeance is unquestionably a divine prerogative. Cardinal Newman well points out, in his Grammar of Assent, that conscience, to which we owe the inmost and the surest revelation of religion, brings before us the Infinite and Eternal, under the attribute of justice, retributive justice. A great organic instinct of retribution is implanted in our conscience and instinct never deceives. Punishment is first and before all things retributive. It is the meting out to the offender of what he has earned. It is the wages' of his transgression. It is the penalty which is the merited recompense of his crime. Yes: the underlying principle which makes criminal justice just is that it is a moral judgment exhibited in visible form. And in awarding it the Civil Magistrate fulfils his highest function :

In writing these words I have in my mind a well-known passage in Cardinal Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk.

4 It is interesting to remember that the highest Theistic conception attained by ancient Hellas, and magnificently brought out by Aeschylus in the Agamemnon, was of a God of Justice who notes and avenges crime.

he is, as St. Paul teaches, 'the Minister of God, a Revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.' The very first step towards the criminal's reformation is that he should apprehend and lay to heart this verity. He owed obedience to the law for conscience' sake-always, of course, supposing that the law was not in conflict with the supreme dictates of that inward monitor. He has chosen to disobey it, and it is 'great harm to disobey.' To offend against the regulations of right and wrong, which are the very conditions of human fellowship, is to incur a debt to the community. The criminal must be brought to see that justice requires the debt to be paid, the offence to be expiated. This has been the teaching of the great masters of ethics from the first till now, and has been admirably formulated by one of the greatest of them. 'Punishment,' says Kant, must be justified as punishment, that is as mere evil for its own sake, so that the punished person, when he looks thereon, must himself confess that right is done to him and that his lot is entirely commensurate with his conduct.'

In what I have just been writing I have had in mind the Chaplain in our jails and the Christian religion of which he is the minister. I add that all the great religions of the world are here at one with the teaching of Christianity. Its doctrine as to wrong-doing and punishment is sternly enforced by Islam. It is the very corner-stone of the teaching of the gentle and infinitely pitiful Gotama. Buddhism asserts, most emphatically, the moral responsibility of man and the penalty, most righteous and most inevitable, which attends upon his doing evil, through the terrible mechanism of unappeasable retribution called Karma.

But to return. The Chaplain then is the great reformatory agent in our prisons, and from him the prisoner will learn the great truth that punishment is first and foremost vindictive or retributory, a truth suppressed and denied by that 'great conspiracy against conscience '-to use Cardinal Newman's wordswhich is so monstrous a fact of these latter days of abounding materialism. Unhappily, however, the Chaplain's influence, however powerful and real while he is in direct communication with the prisoner, is too often evanescent. Some-what percentage it is impossible to say-some of the prisoners in our jails are feeble minded-to have put them there is a crime. And the rest to whom this description cannot apply, vary much in their capacity for good. The Chaplain's exhortations fall sometimes on stony ground, sometimes among tares. But even when they fall on good ground, we cannot be sanguine as to the resultant fruit when the house of bondage is left behind. Doubtless some ex-prisoners persevere in the good resolutions which have been implanted in the days of their captivity-thanks largely to the Societies which extend to them a helping hand. But it is not