writers a phrase, which is at once the motto and the principle of his faith. '_L'individualization de la peine_' sums up concisely the new tendency. This phrase aptly expresses the efforts now being made throughout the civilized world to grapple with the problem: not by dealing with prisoners as 'abstract types,' or in the mass, by imposing hard and fast regulations to be adopted for one and all irrespective of individuality, but to deal with each case on its merits: to note its peculiarities, and above all things, by 'preventive' measures to avert an otherwise certain gravitation towards crime. In the working out of this problem, the International Commission is a sort of 'League of Nations,' ever striving by the invention of new Preventive measures, not so much to improve the habitation, custody, and treatment of offenders who are committed to prison, but to prevent them from arriving at that stage where commitment to prison becomes necessary, for long or short periods, in the interests of the security and protection of the community. The aid of science is more and more invoked, and it is with reason and good purpose that the International movement professes to be a movement for the discovery and propagation of '_la science pénitentiaire_.' Of all the sciences invoked in the cause of prison reform, medical science is assuming more and more a preponderating _rôle_ in the domain of criminal justice. The mysterious laws of 'psychiatry'--a word of common use and application in all discussions in the problem of crime,--now engage, especially in the United States, a keen and close attention. The 'psychical laboratory' is, in many States, a necessary appanage of a penal institution. In theory, the knowledge of the mental state of a person committing an offence is a condition precedent to a correct assessment of guilt. Such investigation includes not only the diagnosis by scientific test of mental state, but of all those pathological conditions resulting, perhaps, from physical or external causes, hereditary or otherwise, which may be held to attenuate responsibility for any given act. The psychical laboratory as a system in aid of justice assumes, of course, a normal or reasonable being, and to such a being alone can full responsibility be attached. It is obvious to what extravagance such a system can be pushed, but the underlying principle is sound, and a perfect prison system, based on science, would adapt its treatment to a far greater degree than at present to the varying categories of offenders, who, under the old classical system, which recognized only the uniform and abstract type of crime and criminal, would be consigned equally to the one abstract and uniform type of penalty--the prison cell.