manufacturing system first made its appearance--England, to wit. At the present day it is the great manufacturing countries, England, Belgium, France, and the United States of America, in which most is done in this regard. _Special Legislation Dealing with Youthful Criminals._--It is to that portion of the newer criminal law which concerns youthful criminals that the dogmatists object most strongly. They complain that it endangers very seriously personal liberty and parental authority. There are many who argue to-day against coercive reformatory education, on the ground that personal freedom and parental authority should be inviolable. We even find some who attack modern ideas from the standpoint of various legal theories. Such persons tell us that coercive reformatory education interferes more than punishment with the child’s individual liberty, and that it absolutely ignores parental authority. The criminal authorities have absolutely no right, in their view, to supervise a child’s education, but merely to punish it or to set it at liberty. But this portion of modern criminal jurisprudence does not aim merely at the suppression of juvenile criminality. It is likewise an experimental laboratory, as it were, for the testing of new institutions, the success or failure of which is eagerly awaited by criminal jurists. If any institution thus tested proves successful, its application is immediately extended to other portions of the criminal law. In the United States of America, for example, the method which has been found successful in the case of juvenile offenders is now being applied in the case also of young adult criminals. _Proposals Bearing on the Question of Criminal Responsibility at Different Ages._--(_a_) A radical proposal for reform is that the distinction between juvenile and adult criminals should be abolished, and that, instead, criminals should be classified simply as educable or non-educable. This proposal is impracticable. In consequence of the application of the principles of individualisation and classification, the distinctions between the various age-classes of criminals become, indeed, of less and less importance. There may even be a little truth in the assertion that in a large country, owing to racial and climatic differences, no uniform classification of offenders according to ages can be adopted. And yet the definition of age-limits in the case of criminal offenders is indispensable. In a few cases such distinction may render the appropriate treatment of offenders more difficult, but in the great majority of instances they facilitate the work of judges and magistrates, and afford a means of individualisation.