Arrived in Rome, I found that they had put down my name for the first day’s program, and I spent the time, till the congress opened, in my room writing up my paper. I had chosen for my subject: "The Need of a New Terminology in the Study of Crime." More and more this reform seems imperative to me. The effort to express the modern attitude towards crime in the old phraseology is like putting new wine in old skins. Just as we no longer say that a man is "possessed of the devil," but use such newer words as "paranoia," "paresis" and so forth, we must give up such terms as "burglary in the second degree." It is a remnant of mediæval scholasticism and means nothing today. It is a dead concept of an act and gives no account of the live human being who is supposed to have committed it. "Murder," the code implies, "is always murder, just as oxygen is always oxygen." But while one atom of oxygen is exactly like every other, no two murderers are at all alike. Crime is infinitely complex. "Larceny"—a fixed and formal term—cannot describe the intricate reactions from the varied stimuli of environment, which lead a particular bunch of nerve cells to steal. We must turn our back on the abstract words of the ancient law books and develop a vocabulary which expresses actualities. That first day of the congress, seemed to me the very apotheosis of absurd futility. Half a hundred delegates from all corners of the world assembled in one of the court rooms of the palace of justice. We were supposed to be serious, practical men, come together to devise means of improving the methods of combating crime. We sat for an hour and a half through tiresome, bombastic exchanges of international greetings. The election of a chairman, of honorary presidents and vice-presidents, of a real secretary and a host of honorary secretaries took up the rest of the morning. A nation’s parliament could have organized in less time and we had only come together to exchange ideas, we had no power. When we convened after lunch, I was called on. There were three delegates from England, one from Canada and another from the United States. The rest had only a long-distance knowledge of English. I have rarely felt more uncomfortably foolish than I did, reading my paper to that uncomprehending audience. The first two to discuss my thesis were Germans. Neither had completely understood my argument, they attacked me with acrimony. The third speaker was an Italian, who shook his fist at me. I have not the faintest idea what he was talking about. Then one of the English delegation, a bishop, got up and said that it was well to have a note of humanism in our discussion, after all criminals were—or at least had been—men like us. As Archbishop Somebody had said on seeing a prisoner led out to execution—"There, but for the grace of God, go I."