In the matter of our administration of justice there is a very simple question to be asked by every man of his own conscience: What do I believe is the object of punishment? Until this question has been asked and coherently answered by the community it is obviously as mad to apply punishment as for a man to set out to dine with a friend of whose address he has no knowledge. But by how many people has this question been asked; by how many has it been coherently answered? The whole administration of our justice at present treads the quicksands of ambiguity as to the object of punishment. The vast majority of us have never put to ourselves the question at all, being quite satisfied that the object of punishment is to “serve people right”; and out of the small minority who have asked the question the far greater number have given themselves no coherent answer. And yet it is only from a coherent and wise answer, graven in letters of stone on our law courts and prisons, in letters of feeling in our hearts, that hope of diminution in crime, and in the damage which arises from it, both to the community and to the offender, can come. Now, whatever sentimental relation there be between punishment and our deep instincts of equity, _the object of punishment is the protection of society and the reformation of the offender_. That is the only safe rule _in practice_; and everything in our administration of justice which conflicts with it is falsely conceived. But it is the commonest thing in the world for people to accept that definition without considering in the least what it means; for experts, after thoroughly agreeing with it, to suddenly remark that for such and such a crime they, personally, would have no mercy; for sentences to be passed in which the judge has obviously fitted the punishment to his private views of the heinousness of the crime, without real regard for the protection of society, or for the reformation of the person sentenced. All which is extremely natural, and very bad. The confusion arises from not keeping the idea of the protection of society closely enough coupled with the idea of the reformation of the offender; from dwelling too much on the past, and not looking enough to the future; from the continued existence of the old theory, “an eye for an eye” condemned to death over nineteen hundred years ago, but still dying very hard in this Christian country. The protection of Society includes the adjustment of punishment so as not to leave on the mind of the injured person a crude sense of injury unhealed by retribution. It includes the removal from individuals of the desire to take the law into their own hands. It is necessary to preserve in punishment a due element of deterrence. The State and those who administer its functions have no business with anything but the scientific application of the best means to do all this, and reform the offender.