So long as penal procedure is not radically reformed, as we have proposed, in such a manner that the inquiry, the discussion, the decision upon the evidence, which are the only proper elements of penal justice, aim at and lead up to the determination of a prisoner's biological and psychological type, it will be humanly impossible for the practical application of these judicial measures to overcome the mechanical impersonality of justice, which applies rather to the crime than to the criminal. Hence the conditional sentence, though it was evolved by the abuse and disastrous effects of short terms of imprisonment, and in spite of its generating principle that ``the first fault is pardoned and the second whipped,'' has to-day only the character of an eclectic graft on the old classic stock of penal law and procedure. As such, notwithstanding its attractive features (for it indicates a step in advance towards the positive system of social defence, which desires to see the application of collective defence to the individual's power of offence), it seems to me to be destined, not long after its earliest application, to deceive the anticipations of happy and beneficent results, such as its advocates entertain. Moreover, the conditional sentence, precisely be<p 281>cause it is a graft on the old classic stock of penal justice, has another very serious defect, inasmuch as it overlooks the victims of the offence. Its advocates, in fact, continue to maintain that reparation of damage is a private concern, for which they benevolently recommend a strict remedy, but which they nevertheless, in practice, entirely overlook. The offender who is conditionally sentenced is, therefore, to secure a suspension of punishment--which, indeed, it is as well to remember, he also secures, often enough, by a legal limitation, or, as in Italy, by the remission of punishments under three months, accorded whenever (as is generally the case) there is a petition for pardon. But is there any one who gives a thought to the victims? From this point of view it may even be said that the conditional sentence makes things worse than before; for the victims are not to have so much as the satisfaction of seeing punishment inflicted on those who have injured them, in cases of assault, theft, swindling, and the like. And it is useless to make the platonic remark, as M. Fayer has done, that punishment is punishment even when conditional, and involves the censure of the public authority, and holds in reserve a punishment for relapse, and hangs over the head of the offender until his term of probation has expired. All this is pretty enough--except the relapse, which implies the poor consolation of a repetition of the offence, which would be no great satisfaction for the victims of the first. But it is all hypothetical and <p 282>theoretical. The essential thing, so far as the victims are concerned, is that the offender goes unpunished.