In our view, punishment ought to be regarded as at once an expiation and a discipline, or, in other words, an expiatory discipline.  This definition includes all that is valuable in the theories just reviewed, and excludes all that is imperfect in them.  The criminal is an offender against the fundamental order of society in somewhat the same way as a disobedient child is an offender against the centre of authority in the home or the school.  The punishment inflicted on the child may take the form of revenge, or it may take the form of retribution, or it may take the form of deterrence, but it undoubtedly takes its highest form when it combines expiation with discipline.  Punishment of this nature still remains punitive as it ought to do, but it is at the same time a kind of punishment from which something may be learned.  It does not merely consist in inflicting pain, although the presence of this element is essential to its efficacy; it consists rather in inflicting pain in such a way as will tend to discipline and reform the character.  Such a conception of punishment excludes the barbarous element of vengeance; it is based upon the civilised ideas of justice and humanity, or rather upon the sentiment of justice alone, for justice is never truly just except when its tendency is also to humanise.

  “Sine caritate justicia
  Vindicationi similis.”

From the theory of punishment let us now turn to its methods.  The most severe of these is the penalty of death.  A great deal has been said and written both for and against the retention of this form of punishment.  To set forth the arguments on both sides in a fair and adequate manner would require a volume; it must, therefore, suffice to say that in the field of controversy the contest between the opposing parties is a fairly even one.  In fact, looking at the matter from a purely polemical point of view, the advocates of the death penalty have probably the best of it.  It has, however, to be remembered that such questions are not solved by battalions of abstract arguments, but by the slow, silent, invisible action of public sentiment.  The way in which this impalpable sentiment is moving on the question of the death penalty may be seen, first, in the manner in which crime after crime during the present century has been excluded from the supreme sentence of the law, and secondly, in the steady diminution of capital executions throughout the civilised world.  If the present drift of feeling continues for another generation or two it is not at all improbable, in spite of temporary reactions here and there, that the question of capital punishment will have solved itself.

Another form of punishment is transportation.  As far as Great Britain is concerned, transportation possesses only a historic interest.  No one is now sent out of the country for offences against the law.  Experience showed that penal colonies were a failure, and that the truly criminal could be more effectively dealt with at home.  Within recent years the French have resorted to the system of transportation; but, according to several eminent French authorities, the penal settlement in New Caledonia is hardly justifying the anticipations of its founders.