It is a noble mission to oppose the ferocious penalties of the Middle
Ages. But it is still nobler to forestall crime. The classic school of
criminology directed its attention merely to penalties, to repressive
measures after crime had been committed, with all its terrible moral
and material consequences. For in the classic school, the remedies
against criminality have not the social aim of improving human life, but
merely the illusory mission of retributive justice, meeting a moral
delinquency by a corresponding punishment in the shape of legal
sentences. This is the spirit which is still pervading criminal
legislation, although there is a sort of eclectic compromise between the
old and the new. The classic school of criminology has substituted for
the old absolutist conceptions of justice the eclectic theory that
absolute justice has the right to punish, but a right modified by the
interests of civilized life in present society. This is the point
discussed in Italy in the celebrated controversy between Pasquale
Stanislao Mancini and Terencio Mamiani, in 1847. This is in substance
the theory followed by the classic criminologists who revised the penal
code, which public opinion considers incapable of protecting society
against the dangers of crime. And we have but to look about us in the
realities of contemporaneous life in order to see that the criminal code
is far from being a remedy against crime, that it remedies nothing,
because either premeditation or passion in the person of the criminal
deprive the criminal law of all prohibitory power.
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