Our courts of justice are still pervaded by the barbaric notion of the duel. We arrange a brilliant tournament, and are interested not so much in the investigation of truth as in the question of who will “win.” We cannot hope for any immediate radical change in this method, but it is our duty to do all that we can to strengthen those elements in our courts which are concerned, not with the gaining of a cause, but with the investigation of truth. This and all other reforms in our methods of dealing with the criminal, as I have already pointed out, and would again insist, cannot be attained by a mere administrative _fiat_; nor is it desirable that they should be. Before any reform can be safely embodied in the law it must first be embodied in the popular consciousness. We need here, as in so many other fields of our social life, a strong body of intelligent and educated opinion. This must accompany that revival, under the inspiration of the methods of natural science, of that science of jurisprudence which is at present the most stationary and scholastic of all the sciences. These problems are every day becoming more pressing. The level of criminality, it is well known, is rising, and has been rising during the whole of the present century, throughout the civilised world. In France, in Germany, in Italy, in Belgium, in Spain, in the United States, the tide of criminality is becoming higher steadily and rapidly. In France it has risen several hundred per cent.; so also for several kinds of serious crime in many parts of Germany; in Spain the number of persons sent to perpetual imprisonment nearly doubled between 1870 and 1883; in the United States the criminal population has increased since the war, relatively to the population, by one-third. There is, no doubt, room for fallacy in many of these statistics; various circumstances serve to modify such figures--a greater or less intolerance of crime, more or less success in capturing criminals, and variations in the methods of dealing with them. On the whole, however, there seems to be a general agreement that the increase is real.