ABSTRACT
The great amelioration of the criminal law by the exertions of Sir Samuel Romilly, Sir James Mackintosh, and other reformers have not been succeeded by any corresponding reform of our system of punishment as a whole, which still remains thoroughly inhuman and unjust, and opposed to all the admitted principles by which punishment among a civilised people should be regulated. In an allied department, the confinement of the insane, there is also much room for reform. Their actual treatment, both in public and private asylums, has of late years undergone enormous improvement, and is now almost as good as it can be made in large asylums, where there is no possibility of that proper classification, isolation, and individual treatment which are essential to curative success. The horrors and barbarities practised by all the troops of the great Powers during their recent invasion of China are a crowning proof of the ever-increasing deterioration of character produced by militarism.
