In Scotland in a single year not fewer than “six hundred and ninety persons were committed to prison who had been in confinement at least ten times before. Of these, three hundred and ninety-three had been in prison at least twenty times before, and twenty-three at least fifty times!” (_Hill on Crime_, p. 28.) These figures speak for themselves. Our whole system is glaringly unscientific. We do not remove the conditions that act as causes of crime. We punish, and sometimes severely, yet we let loose again offenders not one whit more prepared than before to withstand the temptations of freedom. We calmly support and approve an enormous expenditure of public funds upon criminals and crime; we carefully select good men to be prison managers, officers and chaplains; we secure cleanliness and sanitation within the prisons, and so forth; but these efforts are utterly futile because the system is wrong—the criminal law of Great Britain is based upon a false, an irrational principle. The causes of crime within our province to deal with are of a two-fold nature—objective and subjective. Poverty, i.e. hunger and want, a slum environment, rough handling in infancy and childhood, a mischievous training and the absence of all conditions favourable to gentle, virtuous life—these are some of the objective causes creating crime which society is bound to remove. Among causes deciding the innate character of every newly-born babe, the forces of heredity stand out conspicuously. I have demonstrated that aggregate humanity, in a scientific age, has the means of controlling these forces and directing them to the production of physical, mental and moral health in the individual, and consequently in the community. The born criminal type may become gradually improved by careful and wise treatment under life-long restraints. Meanwhile, to seek reformation of this type, by prison discipline alone, and treat it by methods adapted to corrigible culprits, is a folly dishonouring to the developed reason of man. We have abundant evidence that the type exists. Mr. Frederick Hill, late Inspector of Prisons, says: “Nothing has been more clearly shown in the course of my inquiries than that crime is hereditary to a considerable extent ... it proceeds from father to son in a long line of succession.” (_Hill on Crime_, p. 55.) Mr. J. B. Thomson, Resident Surgeon of the Perth Prison, states of the facts of prison life: “They press on my mind the conviction that crime in general is a moral disease of a chronic and congenital nature, intractable when transmitted from generation to generation.” And Mr. George Combe, speaking of prisons in the United States of America, wrote: “I have put the question to many keepers of prisons whether they believed in the possibility of reforming all offenders. From those whose minds were humane and penetrating, I have received the answer—they did not, for experience had convinced them that