Mediæval legislators were not restrained by any scruples of this sort; they regarded the criminal, both human and animal, as the sole author of the crime, ascribing it simply to his own wickedness and never looking beyond the mere actual deed to the social influences, psychical and physical characteristics and inherited qualities, that impelled him with irresistible force to do iniquitous things. This was doubtless a very narrow, superficial and utterly unphilosophical view of human action and responsibility; the danger now-a-days lies in the opposite extreme, in the tendency to pity the vicious individual as the passive product and commiserable victim of unfortunate conditions, and while engaged in the laudable attempt to improve these conditions by working out broad and benevolent plans of permanent relief and reformation for the future amelioration of society, to relax penalties and to fail in providing by sufficiently stringent measures for its present security. Tribunals have only to do with individual criminals as their conduct affects the general welfare. In what manner their characters have been formed by ancestral agencies and other predispositions may be an interesting study to the psychologist and the sociologist, but does not concern the judge or the jurist in the discharge of their official functions. The problem of crime is therefore a very simple one, so far as the criminal lawyer has to deal with the concrete case, but very complex, when we look beyond the overt act to its genesis in the life of the race. The proper administration of penal justice is weakened and defeated by mixing itself up with psycho-pathological inquiries wholly foreign to it.