Let us consider the consequences of my previous statements. The essential condition of social development is enforcement, where necessary, of peace and order by adequate means. The criminal law corresponds to one part of this process. The whole social system includes machinery for prevention, for reformation and for education, as well as for punishment; and it is only when taken in its relation to other parts of the system, that we can give the full justification. Its methods are, as I have said, obviously full of imperfections, from the purely moral point of view. If we consider it as an isolated fact, comparably to the interference of a quasi-supernatural power, which clutches an offender here and there, and punishes him simply to frighten others, the arbitrary and unequal nature of the proceeding assumes an air of injustice. In fact, if you take the extreme individualist view, according to which each man is an independent unit, while society represents a force impinging upon him from without, it always becomes difficult to introduce the conception of justice without ending in the approval of anarchy. When, however, we consider the social organisation as including all the means of civilising society, of strengthening the general spirit of order, as well as acting upon the fears of the disorderly, we have to take wider considerations into account. We become sensible, in the first place, of the importance of the principle that punishment should never be substituted for prevention. Wherever it is possible to remove temptations, or take precautions which make crime impossible, we can have no excuse for adopting the blundering and unsatisfactory system of punishing those who have committed it. We admit, that is, that the criminal law, though absolutely necessary, is an essentially clumsy contrivance, to be used only when other methods fail. When certain punishments have been condemned as brutalising, it has been replied that the persons punished were already so brutal that it is impossible to make them worse. But the brutalising influence is even more objectionable as it applies to the legislator than as it applies to the criminal. To make up for neglect of appropriate precautions by severity against the offender, is to adopt the necessarily arbitrary method in which chance must always play a part in place of more effective and civilising methods. Frugality in applying punishment is desirable as a guarantee that we are acting in the proper spirit. An Indian official was asked why the native police were disposed to use torture for the detection of crime. The cause was, he said, mainly from laziness: it was so much easier to sit in the shade, rubbing red pepper in a poor devil's eyes, than to go about in a hot sun collecting evidence. So, it would be very much easier to inflict cruel punishment than to try to remove the causes of crime; and a resolution never to use the more brutal methods is not, as I think, to be regarded