But it is in society’s treatment of the criminal class that there is to be traced the greatest progress in humanitarianism. In the pre-Norman period in England the punishments for crime were characterized by a barbarity incredibly callous. “Men branded on the forehead, without hands, without feet, without tongues, lived as an example of the danger which attended the commission of petty crimes, and as a warning to all who had the misfortune of holding no higher position than that of a churl.... The eyes were plucked out; the nose, the ears, and the upper lips were cut off; the scalp was torn away; and sometimes even, there is reason to believe, the whole body was flayed alive.”[762] What was true of English law was true of the laws of every other European country. And there was little or no essential amelioration of these savage law systems before the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Seventy thousand executions took place in England during the reign of Henry VIII.[763] “In the reign of William III there does not appear to have been any consciousness that the penal laws were, in many respects, disgraceful to any community but a tribe of savages.”[764] If a definite point of departure of the movement for the humanizing of the criminal laws of Europe and the putting of the treatment of criminals on an ethical basis be sought, it will be found in the life and writings of the Italian jurist Beccaria,[765] who maintained that the effect of cruel punishments is to increase crime by indurating the sensibilities of the people.[766] A great impulse to the humanitarian movement initiated by Beccaria was given by the devoted labors of the great philanthropist John Howard (1726–1790), who, with his eyes opened to the awful conditions of prison life through official connection with Bedford jail, where Bunyan dreamed, spent his life in visiting all lands inspecting prisons and jails and dungeons and lazar houses, and “taking the gauge and dimension of misery, depression, and contempt.” The crusade of John Howard marks the real beginning of practical prison reform, which has “transformed prisons from hells into hospitals for recovery,” and revolutionized the entire theory and administration of judicial punishment.[767] The aim and purpose of the modern penitentiary system is to develop self-respect and manhood.[768] To this end the lock-step and striped clothing have been abolished in many prisons, and along with them all cruel and humiliating punishments. The establishment of reform schools, reformatories, and penitentiaries, the introduction of the indeterminate sentence, the proposed creation of courts of rehabilitation, and the founding of the juvenile court,[769] mark the ethical advance which the last century has witnessed in this domain.[770] _6. International Ethics: the New International Conscience_ [Sidenote: The development of international morality foreshadowed by the earlier development of intranational morality]