PREFACE.

SOME excuse seems necessary for adding to the now somewhat redundant stores of English legal literature another elementary manual of Criminal Law. The only justification I can offer lies in the fact that the present volume embodies the substance of lectures which have been delivered at Cambridge year by year throughout the past quarter of a century-a period long enough to afford even the least competent lecturer some opportunity of ascertaining what principles, and what illustrations, are so successful in arresting the attention and impressing the memory of students as to be worth putting before them in the earliest manual which they peruse.

In reducing my lectures to the form of a book, I have kept in view the needs of two classes of readers. For a general outline of Criminal Law may prove useful not only to young men preparing for academical or professional examinations, but also to many older men when called upon to undertake, without previous legal training, the duties of a justice of the

peace. Both these classes find it important, moreover, to familiarize themselves with the foundations of the law of Evidence; and I have therefore devoted a portion of the present volume to that subject.

In preparing the book, I have aimed at making its range of topics no wider than may be grasped, upon a first perusal, even by a reader previously unfamiliar with law. But I have tried to treat each individual topic with such fulness as may serve to fix it effectually in the reader's memory. Yet the susceptibility of his memory must depend very much (as all lecturers soon discover) upon the extent to which the matter in hand arouses his interest. Fortunately the law of Crime-when once the preliminary difficulties attendant upon the chaotic form which it still retains in England have been faced and surmounted—is a branch of jurisprudence peculiarly capable of being rendered interesting. It is closely linked with history, with ethics, with politics, with philanthropy. My endeavour has been to make it attractive to the reader, by supplying him with. enough illustrative examples to give vividness and reality to all the abstract principles of our Criminal Law; and also by tracing out its connexion with the past sufficiently to explain the various historical anomalies with which it is still encumbered; and, moreover, by suggesting to him the most important

controversies-psychological, social, juridical—that it seems likely to arouse in the future. Partly for the last-mentioned purpose, and partly because their importance even for present-day practice seems to me to be greater than is often supposed, I have given more than usual prominence to the subjects of Malice, Responsibility, and the Measure of Punishment. I also have availed myself freely of the official statistics of our courts and prisons; in the hopes of enabling the reader to obtain a precise idea of the present administration of criminal justice in this country, and of the comparative importance of the various forms of its procedure. And I have taken account, in various places, of the important, though as yet unsuccessful, efforts made by Parliament more than twenty years ago to improve both the substance and the form of English criminal law.

To readers who have time to utilize the references given in the footnotes, it may be well to explain that I have preferred to cite Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law by the pages of its first edition, since that numbering remains recorded on the margins of the second edition also; and, further, that the cases cited as from " K. S. C." will be found in the volume of Select Cases in Criminal Law, prepared by me for the Cambridge University Press.

I cannot conclude this Preface without expressing the cordial thanks I owe to my friend, Mr R. T. Wright, for his great kindness in reading through the whole of the proof-sheets and favouring me with many valuable suggestions; as also to my friend and former pupil, Mr W. C. A. Landon, of Gray's Inn, for assiduously aiding me to prepare the book for the press, and for compiling the index.

DOWNING COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,

May 1902.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

In hopes of rendering the book more full and more clear, I have introduced many slight alterations. A detailed account, also, of the new Court of Criminal Appeal is given at pp. 419, 490.

I learn that some beginners find Chapter I., in its attempt to define the nature of Crime, exceptionally difficult. Those who do so, I advise to postpone its perusal until after they have read the rest of the volume. Definitions belong, indeed, rather to the end of our knowledge than to the beginning of it.

Oct. 1907.