23 MARCH 1934, Page 6

In apologizing for intruding into a sphere not properly his

own when he delivered the first Clarke-Hall memorial . lecture on Monday, the Archbishop of York was perhaps • forestalling the kind of criticism that his incursion into economic territory has provoked in the last fort- night or so. Of the practical suggestions he made I:thought that of the institution of chairs of criminal juris- prudence at " not one but a dozen " British universities was the most interesting. But for our national 'mistrust of the purely theoretic it would be odd that we should never have followed what on the Continent is the almost universal practice. Professorships do not in themselves produce Lombrosos, but the consciousness that the treatment of crime must in many cases be therapeutic has developed considerably since Lombroso's day (Erewhon was not written in vain) ; and though professors of criminal jurisprudence might make bad Old Bailey judges; a systematic study of crime in all its aspects would be calculated to produce that instructed opinion on which a wholesome attitude on the part of society towards the criminal depends.

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