This is the only choice for the positivists; for we cannot attach much importance to the opinion of the German jurists, Holtzendorff, Geyer, and others, who would do away with perpetual imprisonment altogether. Professor Lucchini took up this theory in Italy, saying that the personal freedom of the convict ought to be limited in its exercise, but not suppressed as a right, and that imprisonment for life destroys ``the moral and legal personality of the criminal in one of its most important human factors, the sociable instinct.'' He added that punishment ``ought not to become exhausted by excess of duration.'' Surely it is not speaking seriously to say that the right of the individual cannot be suppressed if necessity demands it, when we see it done every day in cases of legitimate self-defence; and that punishment is exhausted by excess of duration, when it is precisely the duration of banishment from one's kind which constitutes the only real efficacy of punishment; and to speak of the sociable instinct in connection with the most anti-social criminals. And it is only by oblivion of the elementary and least contestable data of criminal bio-psychology that the exclusion of all life- punishments can be maintained, on the ground that this perpetuity ``is contrary to the reformative principle of punishment, to the principle that punishment ought to aim not only at <p 247>afflicting the prisoner, but also at arousing in him, if possible, the moral sense, or at strengthening him, and opening up to him a path by which he can hope to be readmitted into society, amended and rehabilitated. Perpetuity of punishment excludes this possibility.'' The framers of the Dutch penal code replied to these observations of Professor Pols, first in the name of common sense, that ``punishment is not inflicted for the benefit of the prisoner, but for that of society,'' and secondly, with something of irony, that ``even for the sake of the abolition of capital punishment, and to prevent a reaction in favour of this punishment, we must uphold the right of shutting up for ever the few malefactors whose release would be dangerous.'' It is entirely futile to consider the amendment of criminals as opposed to imprisonment for life, when it is known that born criminals, authors of the most serious crimes, for whom such punishment is reserved, are precisely those whose amendment is impossible, and that the moral sense attributed to them is only a psychological fallacy of the classical psychologist, who attributes to the conscience of the criminal that which he feels in his own honest and normal conscience.