It is no easy task now-a-days for penal legislation to keep pace with psychiatral investigation and to adjust itself to the wide range and nice distinctions of modern psycho-pathology; nor is it necessary to do so. _Salus socialis suprema lex esto._ Society is bound to protect itself against every criminal assault, no matter what its source or character may be. This is the ultimate object not only of the prison and the scaffold, but also of all reformatories for juvenile offenders and vagabonds, who by judicious correction and instruction may perhaps be brought to amend their ways and thus be prevented from becoming a social danger by swelling the disorderly ranks of the permanently criminal classes. If a person proves to be unamenable to moral or penitential measures and remains an incorrigible transgressor, it is the duty of the community to set him aside by death or by life-long durance. Penal legislation does not aim primarily at the betterment of the individual; laws are enacted not for the purpose of making men good and noble, but solely for the purpose of rendering them safe members of society. This is effected by depriving the irremediably vicious of their liberty and, if necessary, also of their life. The pardoning power, too, must be exercised with the utmost reserve and circumspection. The state does not look upon public offences as sins but as crimes. The introduction of the theological conception of delinquencies into the province of civil government has always been the vice of hierarchies and has never failed to work immense mischief by leading inevitably to impertinent intermeddling with matters of conscience and private opinion, putting a premium on pretended repentance and like hypocrisies, and converting the witness-box into a confessional and the court of justice into a court of inquisition. This has been uniformly the result wherever a body of priests has become a body of rulers, endowed with sovereignty in the administration of secular affairs.