Example alone is the end of all public punishments and rewards. Laws never inflict disgrace in resentment, nor confer honour from gratitude. ‘For it is very hard, my lord’, said a convicted felon at the bar to the late excellent judge Burnet, ‘to hang a poor man for stealing a horse’. ‘You are not to be hanged, sir, answered my ever-honoured and beloved friend, for stealing a horse, but you are to be hanged that horses may not be stolen.

Henry Fielding too, was honoured in his time as a just and humane magistrate, but few of us today would feel able to endorse the judge’s action as he does. Even the severity of the sentence scarcely repels us so much as the callousness with which the judge scores a debating point at the expense of the condemned man. And is his point even valid? Put like this, the theory of pure deterrence appears crudely utilitarian, and difficult to justify morally, because it treats a human being as only an instrument of deterrence. Can we truly say that the man is not being hanged for stealing a horse? Would he have been hanged if he had not stolen the horse? Surely not. And in that case, can we say that penal justice is concerned only with the future effects of punishment, and that we need not consider what punishment the criminal has deserved?

In talking about punishment, there is a danger of a false antithesis arising through over-simplification. Retribution, deterrence and reformation are sometimes presented as if they were mutually exclusive— as if the adoption of one theory automatically excluded the other two.

The title of this article is also that of a recent book on the subject, which is a worthy attempt to evaluate certain hypotheses against an objective study of social and psychological factors. The author says: ‘Our fundamental aim was to make a comparison, critical for our theoretical understanding of later social maladjustment, of the divergent routes taken in emotional development by neurotic and delinquent children, from their early years’.

There is no hard and fast distinction between the two groups, any more than there is in any category of human beings, but by trying to find the relative frequency and importance of the various factors in the two groups, it was hoped to throw into sharper relief and render more clear, those factors which are most important in the making of delinquents. The stress of the book is in the main on delinquency rather than on neurosis, as is evident from the excellent ‘Historical Background’ of the first chapter. It is rightly stressed, and this cannot be repeated too often, that: ‘The term “delinquent” is in no way a psychiatric or diagnostic entity in the proper sense, but gives a description of certain types of behaviour in many recognizable personality types’.

The study was undertaken by the teams of the three child guidance clinics in West Sussex under the direction of Dr Bennett, who is a psychologist, originally from Australia. She gives credit to the late Dr Kate Friedlander who originated the project when she was psychiatric Director of the West Sussex child guidance service.

No doctrine of jurisprudence has so distinguished a history as the theory of the natural law. One of its earliest and noblest expressions is to be found in Sophocles, when Antigone refuses to obey Creon’s unjust commands and appeals to a law greater than human ordinance. In the form given to it by Greek Stoicism it was received and developed by the Roman philosophers and jurists; through St Isidore it passed into the middle ages where it found its most perfect expression in St Thomas Aquinas. It was adopted and applied by the Dutch Protestant jurists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it is still embraced by most Catholic thinkers today. It links the pagan and Christian traditions from classical antiquity to the twentieth century; and while its independence of supernatural revelation can be said to give it value as a praeparatio evangelica, its perfect consonance with dogma has led to its almost universal adoption in Catholic thought.

This very acceptance by Catholics has, however, led to a great deal of confusion and to the advancement of some exaggerated and often meaningless claims. It may be useful to subject the natural law doctrine to an analysis based largely on theoretical and practical jurisprudence. Such an analysis will reveal the inadequacy of much that is commonly said about the doctrine as a possible theory of law and will illustrate, perhaps, why few lawyers show much enthusiasm for it.