There are, of course, thousands and thousands of city ordinances relating to the criminal law, but usually to minor offences or matters of police regulation.  Undoubtedly the duplication of them tends to make us not a law-abiding community.  It was the present Boston police commissioner who complained that there were more than eleven thousand ordinances in Boston, which everybody was supposed to know.  We must let the whole matter go by saying that there is a general attempt at universal police regulation of all the actions of life, at least such as are conducted outside of a man’s own house.  Sunday laws, Sabbatarian legislation, have, of course, very largely been abandoned, except when restored in the interest, or supposed interest, of labor.  In the State of New York, for instance, barbers could only shave on Sunday in the city of New York and the town of Saratoga; the reasons for the exception are obvious.

Coming to general principles of penology, there is no doubt that of the three possible theories, revenge, prevention, and reform of the criminal, it is the latter that in the main prevails throughout the United States.  An investigation was conducted some years since by correspondence with a vast number of judges throughout the world, and it proved that this was also their principle of imposing sentences, in the majority of cases.  More radical change is found in that legislation freeing prisoners on parole, providing indeterminate sentences, and in the creation of special courts for boys and young women, with special gaols and reformatories.  Jury trial, of course, remains substantially unchanged from the earlier times, only that the jurors are now in most States permitted to read or to have read the newspapers, and that the government has a right of appeal when the verdict has gone for the prisoner on a point of law.  This matter, upon President Roosevelt’s recommendation, was embodied in an act of Congress.

The legislation making it criminal to advocate assassination or anarchism has been adverted to when we were considering the rights of aliens.  In England, it is treason to imagine the death of the king.  There is no constitutional reason why it should not be treason to imagine the death of the president, or perhaps even the subversion by force of organized society.  Such laws have been passed in Washington, Wisconsin, and other States.

It has, in some States, been made a capital offence to kidnap a child, and, as has been elsewhere said, the rigor of the common law is very generally preserved for the crime of rape.  The most active effort to-day for legislation in matters quasi-criminal is that to extend jury trial over cases of contempt of court, particularly when in violation of a chancery injunction when the act itself is criminal.  The greatest need of criminal legislation is in the writer’s opinion in matters of business or corporate fraud, and in revival of our older English law against the extortion or regrating of middlemen, the engrossing of markets, the artificial enhancing of the prices of the necessaries of life, and the withholding, destruction, or improper preservation of food.  But most of all, as President Taft has urged, greater speed and certainty and less technicality in court trials for crime—­a reform of our legal procedure.