from prison, is like asking a typhoid fever patient to promise not to have a temperature above ninety-nine degrees the next morning.  For a large proportion of criminals—­the percentage has yet to be determined, although the most recent police commissioner of Chicago has estimated it at ninety per cent—­punishment for a period of time and then letting him go free is like imprisoning a diphtheria carrier for a while and then permitting him to commingle with his fellows and spread the germ of diphtheria.

Of course, the doctrine of responsibility is all tangled up with our attitude towards and treatment of crime.  Though clear thought makes mandatory the recognition of a universal cause and effect law, practical common sense has defined free will.  Consent or the withholding of consent to a given course of action has been the criterion of responsibility.

In practice, the limitation of responsibility will depend upon the insertion of extraneous factors into the formula of consent.  The pragmatic test has been and will be the probability that the correction of the somatic or psychic condition would have prevented or will prevent the consent to the crime.  As long as no such condition will be demonstrable, society for its own protection will have to confine the unfortunate individual.

The character of the confinement, its duration, and the uses to which it will be put should be dominated by the idea of discovering the unknown criminal predisposition.  If crime is an abnormality scientifically studiable and controllable like measles, court procedure and prison management will have to be transformed radically.  There is scattered throughout the world now a group of people who are applying medical methods to the diagnosis and treatment of crime.  They are the pioneers who will be remembered in history as the compeers of those who transformed the attitudes toward insanity and its therapy.  The insane were once condemned and handled as criminals are in most civilized countries yet.  The criminologic laboratory as an adjunct to the court of justice, like that associated with the court of Chief Justice Olson in Chicago, remains to be universalized.  What contribution to a more rational treatment of the criminal will the study of the internal secretions make?

It has been shown that the greater number of convicts are mentally and morally subnormal.  To explain the subnormality, the criminologist has conducted and will continue to conduct investigations into the heredity and early environment of the criminal, his education and occupation, the social and religious influences to which he was subjected, and the intelligence test quotient.  The conditioning of the vegetative system and the endocrine status of the prisoner, however, will without a doubt come to occupy the leading positions in any interpretation of crime in the future.