It rests with public opinion in this country to re-animate our attitude towards crime; to shake itself free of our muddled conceptions of the object of punishment; to scotch once for all the spirit of revenge; to rise to a higher, more scientific and incidentally more economic, conception of our duty towards criminals. Let us get rid of the idea that we are protecting society and reforming offenders by inflicting suffering that we falsely call deterrent. Let us change our prisons into Borstal Institutions, and let us do it as soon as is humanly possible. Loss of liberty is, next to loss of life, the most dreaded of all fates; it has, in and by itself, almost all the deterrent force that is needful. There may be here and there men who prefer to be detained under strict discipline to being at liberty; but if there be, it can only be said that the conditions of their lives outside prison must constitute a disgrace to our civilization, and that our penal system cannot safely or justly be allowed to rest on any acquiescence in that disgrace. In the last annual report of the Borstal Association occur the following words: “It is not a namby-pamby method. . . . The panic-monger who prophesies that the ambitious youth of the working classes will still clamour for admission through the gateway of crime to the advantages of Borstal, would be regarded as a humorist by those who have been there and ‘have had enough and learnt sense.’” Let us, then, take discipline and loss of liberty as our sole deterrents, and on those whom we deprive of liberty let us use all the resources of a common sense that shall refuse to apply to criminals methods which would be scouted in the reform of human beings outside prisons. All evidence shows that mere, so-called deterrent, severity is useless. Let us no longer fly in the face of evidence. Let us conform to facts. If we seriously desire to reduce crime to its irreducible minimum we must go to work like doctors. III AN UNPUBLISHED PREFACE (Written in 1910.) It is not my habit to write prefaces, but there are certain things I want to say concerning the play “Justice,” as to its subject-matter, not its artistic qualities, bad, good, or indifferent. Holding perhaps a more intimate knowledge of its author’s mind than can elsewhere be obtained, I would remark that the play is no indictment or attack, but a picture of the whole process of Justice as seen by this painter’s eye. There are thickenings of line here, and thinnings there, occasioned by lack of technical knowledge, or demanded by the exigencies of dramatic craft, but the spiritual essence of the matter is set down honestly, as best it could be perceived by him.