The personal character of the bench vitally affects the quality of the government as a whole. The most academic and exalted codes are of little avail if there are not good judges to administer them; but with good judges it matters little if the codes or statutes are imperfect. In criminal law the application of the statute to the particular case is not, or should not be, a mere question of legal and abstract logic, as it is in civil law. It involves the adaptation of an abstract rule, in a psychological sense, to a living and breathing man; for the criminal judge cannot separate himself from the environment and social life, so as to become a more or less mechanical _lex loquens_. The living and human tests of every criminal sentence reside in <p 176>the conditions of the act, the author, and reacting society, far more than in the written law. Herein we have an opportunity of solving the old question of the authority of the judge, wherein we have gone from one excess to another, from the unbounded authority of the Middle Ages to the Baconian aphorism respecting the law and the judge, according to which the law is excellent when it leaves least to the judge, and the judge is excellent when he leaves himself the least independent judgment. If the function of the criminal judge were always to be, as it is now, an illusory and quantitative inquiry into the moral culpability of the accused, with the equally quantitative and Byzantine rules on attempt, complicity, competing crimes, and so forth--that is to say, if the law were to be applied to the crime and not to the criminal, then it is necessary that the authority of the judge should be restrained within the numerical barriers of articles of the code, of so many years, months, and days of imprisonment to be dosed out, just as the Chinese law decides with much exactitude the length and diameter of the bamboo rods, which in the penal system of the Celestial Empire have the same prominence as penitentiary cells have with us. But if a criminal trial ought to be, on the other hand, a physio- psychological examination of the accused, the crime being relegated to the second line, as far as punishment is concerned, the criminal being kept in the front, then it is clear that the penal code should be limited to a few general rules on the modes of defence and social sanction, and on the constituent <p 177>elements of every crime and offence, whilst the judge should have greater liberty, controlled by the scientific and positive data of the trial, so that he may judge the man before him with a knowledge of humanity.