(_b_) Liability to punishment is almost universally regarded as beginning, at the earliest, at the age of fourteen. This is the period of the commencement of the puberal development, of the cessation of school attendance, when the child passes from the life of the family and the school to a life in the open, and becomes competent to work for a living. (_c_) Many writers demand that the period of nonage, as far as criminal responsibility is concerned, should be extended. They do so on these grounds. The physical development of the individual is not completed till the age of twenty-three or thereabouts. It is inconsistent that one who is still a minor from the point of view of civil law should be regarded as of full age from the point of view of criminal law. Civil law is an affair merely for the owning and well-to-do classes; criminal law arises mainly in consequence of poverty. Hence we may say that in general civil law is created for the former class, and criminal law for the latter. There is certainly at any rate an appearance of class-justice in the assertion that those belonging to the poorer classes at eighteen are mature enough to be sent to jail, whilst those belonging to the well-to-do classes are incompetent to make a binding legal engagement to pay half-a-sovereign until they are twenty-one or twenty-four years of age. But the proposal is impracticable. Its adoption would undoubtedly involve grave dangers to public order, since the age-class of persons from eighteen to twenty-one is characterised by a high and a serious criminality-rate. The result of educative measures in the case of young criminals of such an age is not a very great one, for the formation of the character is by this time far advanced. To extend the age for a coercive reformatory education to include the last years of civil minority would be devoid of any justification upon accepted legal principles. There is no reason why the period of criminal nonage should coincide with the civil. In the first place, a much higher degree of intellectual capacity is requisite to the understanding of a transaction in civil law than to the understanding of the punishable character of an offence. In the second place, a punishable offence is also an offence against public order, but matters of civil law usually concern individuals only. In the third place, as regards the capacity also for infringements of the civil law, narrower limits are imposed than in the case of the capacity to enter into a bargain.