General debt of English law to Beccaria—English utilitarianism due to Beccaria—His influence first traceable in Blackstone—Fallacy of old criminal law in making the amount of temptation the measure of punishment—Eden the first to expose it in his ‘Principles of Penal Law’—Attitude of men of letters to the criminal law, as of Goldsmith, Lord Kames, and Fielding—First attempt at law reform by Sir W. Meredith—Constant opposition of the House of Lords—Effect on reform of Madan’s ‘Executive Justice’ and Paley’s chapter on Crimes and Punishments—Relation of Paley to Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough—Paley’s defence of English law—His approval of the suggestion of throwing murderers into a den of wild beasts—Howard’s ideas of reform and contribution to it—Bad effect of the French Revolution in England—Romilly’s original idea of reform—His Privately Stealing Bill—His criticism of Paley—His Shoplifting Bill rejected by the Lords—The pillory defended by Lord Ellenborough—Capital punishment for forgery by Lord Tenterden—Rapid changes after the Reform Bill—The triumph of Beccaria’s principles 46 CHAPTER IV. THE PROBLEMS OF PENOLOGY. The spirit of Beccaria’s work—The slow progress of penology as a science—Its difficulties—Confusion of guilty and innocent—Relation of intention to crime—Objects and animals once part of the criminal world—Penal laws the expression of moral sentiments, and also the cause of them—Tendency of actions to remain immoral when they have ceased to be penal—Illustration from suicide and infanticide—The Equality of punishment, its Analogy and Proportion to crime, as principles of penal law—The object of punishment—The difficulties of the deterrent-and-reformative theory—The object of law to regulate natural vindictiveness—Traceable historically to this purpose—The measure of punishment on this theory—Absence of any such measure at present—Possibility of a fixed scale of crime and punishment illustrated by the Chinese code—The question of aggravated penalties for re-convictions—The custom contrary to the spirit of the laws: its evil results—Limitations to the universality of the custom—Its error of principle proved by number of re-convictions—The preventiveness of punishment diminished by its great uncertainty—Frequent changes of English penal system—Failure of present system to reform or deter—Punishment itself a cause of crime—Its possible relaxation—Punishments most fitted for injuries to the person, or for offences like cruelty to animals—Indirect preventives of crime—A Prisoners’ Fund—Cumulative sentences—Conclusion 69 BECCARIA’S ‘CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS,’ TRANSLATED. CHAP.