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least annoying of the official objections I encountered was the assertion that it would be illegal in England to take the Bertillon anthropometric measurements. Without setting myself up as a legal authority, I still contend that it is contrary to common sense to consider it any more illegal to take the width of a prisoner's head than (as is always the practice) to take his stature. To clear the ground of this frivolous objection, and to finally clinch the matter, by persist ently knocking at the door of St. Stephen's my efforts secured the distinct enunciation in section 8 of 54 and 55 Vict. c. 69, that the taking of anthropometric measurements should be henceforth sanctioned. The great reform itself, however, still waits. This matter should especially interest the legal fraternity, as serious defects in the ad ministration of the criminal law come nearest home to the general public, bring ing the law itself into disrepute, and en tailing odium on the whole legal world, even that portion most remote from the routine of the criminal law, the public not making nice discriminations in this regard any more than did the Merry Monarch when he proposed to remedy the public ills by hanging a few lawyers. It must be understood that the great success of the Bertillon system in France entails an ever-increasing danger to England so long as our machinery remains in arrear. The most dangerous of all criminals are inter national ones, birds of passage who can ply their vocation in more than one land. If these malefactors discover matters too hot for them in one state, they will surely fly to another if the second affords a safe refuge. This process is going on at this moment so far as France and England are concerned. M. Bertillon's system has now eleven years of service, and half a million of measurements are already docketed in the Paris Prefecture of Police. Such a thing as concealment of identity by any person who has been in the clutches of the law
in France since anthropometry was intro duced is now practically impossible. So immense is the importance of the service rendered to France by M. Bertillon that one of the chief reforms introduced in the perfecture by the new prefect, M. Lupine, was to place M. Bertillon in charge of the whole service of identity, including those terrible masses of sommiers judiciaires (now over eight millions in number) which have been steadily accumulating, since inaugur ated by Fouche in 1805, the individual biographies of every French criminal of the nineteenth century, and which were carefully restored from the duplicate re cords after the Commune catastrophe. Al though the sommiers judiciaires are the subject of such admiring use by the sensa tional novelist and dramatist, they were bidding fair, without M. Bertillon's re habilitation, to become the sport of many of the criminals themselves. Thus the French counterpart of our John Smith, Jean Baptiste Lefevre, counts no less than two thousand representatives among the sommiers. It is M. Bertillon's triumph that neither two thousand Jean Lefevres nor any other mass of humanity confuses his scientific discrimination. By means of his accurate and unchanging bone meas urements, and, above all, by his elaborate yet simple system of classification, he picks out in a few minutes any previous record of each new person brought to his notice. Out of all the half-million and upwards, he has never mistaken one single prisoner for another. What a crying shame for the London administration at this late day to have such a flagrant instance as that of the poor man Blake this past summer at the Central Criminal Court, and at the very moment when my elaborate statement of the working and results of the Bertillon system appeared in the "New Review"! No wonder Blake's solicitor wrote to the press so indignantly about the high-handed methods of our policemen and prison
