leniency, however excellent in itself, is not to be confounded with a decrease of crime. In the study of social phenomena our paramount duty is to look at facts and not appearances. But whether criminality is keeping pace with the growth of population or not it is a problem of great <p vii>magnitude all the same, and it will not be solved, as Professor Ferri points out, by a mere resort to punishments of greater rigour and severity. On this matter he is at one with the Scotch departmental committee appointed to inquire into the best means of dealing with habitual offenders, vagrants, and juveniles. As far as the suppression of vagrancy is concerned the members of the committee are unanimously of opinion that ``the severest enactments of the general law are futile, and that the best results have been obtained by the milder provisions of more recent statutes.'' They also speak of the ``utter inadequacy of the present system in all the variety of detail which it offers to deter the habitual offender from a course of life which devolves the cost of his maintenance on the prison and the poorhouse when he is not preying directly on the public.'' The committee state that they have had testimony from a large number of witnesses supporting the view that ``long sentences of imprisonment effect no good result,'' and they arrive at the conclusion that to double the present sentences would not diminish the number of habitual offenders. In this conclusion they are at one with the views of the Royal Commission on Penal Servitude, which acquiesced in the objection to the penal servitude system on the ground that it ``not only fails to reform offenders, but in the case of the less hardened criminals and especially first offenders produces a deteriorating effect.'' A similar opinion was recently expressed by the Prisons Committee presided over by Mr. Herbert Gladstone. As soon as punishment reaches <p viii>a point at which it makes men worse than they were before, it becomes useless as an instrument of reformation or social defence.