Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.This is an OCR edition with typos.Excerpt from book:CHAPTER III. RETRIBUTION FOR CRIME. In dealing with crime and criminals, society may proceed upon either of four principles. It may inflict vengeance upon the culprit, as an act of justice, because he merits punishment. Or it may have recourse to severe penalties, not from any vindictive motive, but with a view to intimidate the guilty and to deter others from imitating their bad example. Or it may aim at the reformation and rehabilitation of the offender. Or, iinally, it may attempt to prevent the commission .of crime, by vigilance, by the moral training of the young, and especially by devising practical checks to the operation of the causes which are known to swell the aggregate of criminality. These four methods are not mutually exclusive. Historically, however, each of them has been made prominent, in the order of succession in which they have here been named : retrilm- Jjjjn, repression, reformation, prevention. The primitive man knew nothing of law. There was no law in the garden of Eden, except the divine injunction not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. How, then, was social order maintained ? The generally accepted theory of primeval social organization is that it was by families. In other words, it was patriarchal. So it is represented in that ancientrecord, the book of Genesis. The histories of the families of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not unlike instances which might be cited from other nations of antiquity. The power of control was vested in the father of the household — the patria potestas, as it is termed in- Roman law. This power was so great, that it extended even to life and death. It was no less absolute over children than over slaves. The original social unit was not the individual, but the family. The title of the family to pro...