It has continued in the 19th century to look upon crime in the same way that the Middle Age did: "Whoever commits murder or theft, is alone the absolute arbiter to decide whether he wants to commit the crime or not." This remains the foundation of the classic school of criminology. This explains why it could travel on its way more rapidly than the positive school of criminology. And yet, it took half a century from the time of Beccaria, before the penal codes showed signs of the reformatory influence of the classic school of criminology. So that it has also taken quite a long time to establish it so well that it became accepted by general consent, as it is today. The positive school of criminology was born in 1878, and although it does not stand for a mere reform of the methods of criminal justice, but for a complete and fundamental transformation of criminal justice itself, it has already gone quite a distance and made considerable conquests which begin to show in our country. It is a fact that the penal code now in force in this country represents a compromise, so far as the theory of personal responsibility is concerned, between the old theory of free will and the conclusions of the positive school which denies this free will. You can find an illustration of this in the eloquent contortions of phantastic logic in the essays on the criminal code written by a great advocate of the classic school of criminology, Mario Pagano, this admirable type of a scientist and patriot, who does not lock himself up in the quiet egoism of his study, but feels the ideal of his time stirring within him and gives up his life to it. He has written three lines of a simple nudity that reveals much, in which he says: "A man is responsible for the crimes which he commits; if, in committing a crime, his will is half free, he is responsible to the extent of one-half; if one-third, he is responsible one-third." There you have the uncompromising and absolute classic theorem. But in the penal code of 1890, you will find that the famous article 45 intends to base the responsibility for a crime on the simple will, to the exclusion of the free will. However, the Italian judge has continued to base the exercise of penal justice on the supposed existence of the free will, and pretends not to know that the number of scientists denying the free will is growing. Now, how is it possible that so terrible an office as that of sentencing criminals retains its stability or vacillates, according to whether the first who denies the existence of a free will deprives this function of its foundation?