NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF CHARITIES AND

CORRECTION.

We have received from Mr. W. T. Cross, Chicago, the following comprehensive announcement of the forthcoming conference of Charities and Correction which is to be held at Indianapolis, throughout the week of May 10 to 17. One of the most noteworthy features. of this Conference from the point of view of the readers of this JOURNAL and of the organization we represent, is the attention that is being given in its program to the discussion of various problems that fall within the criminologist's sphere. Not only so but the names of participants in the Conference published in the advance program are satisfactory proof that the questions will be discussed from a high plane. The application of scientific method in our field steadily increases the tangibility of our problems. (ED.)

The scientific bias of recent thinking on the crime problem runs throughout the program of the forty-third annual meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Correction which is to occur at Indianapolis May 10-17. Detection and apprehension of subtle, elusive forces that make for social maladjustment seem to be the watchwords.

This ferreting-out method is not confined to the division on corrections, of which Dr. Katharine Bement Davis is chairman. It appears in the section on the family and the community, in Dr. Lee K. Frankel's study of the relationships of insurance to dependency and again in a symposium on effective record keeping. It comes out again in the division of Superintendent E. R. Johnstone, of the Vineland, New Jersey Training School for the Feeble-Minded, where the function of the psychopathic hospital is to be played up and where more light is to be thrown on the difficult distinction between feebleminded and merely backward children. Dr. J. N. Hurty of the Indiana State Board of Health uses this approach in a discussion that has been arranged, of the relationship of sickness to crime, insanity and poverty.

The detective method appears under the head of inebriety, when Arthur Hunter of the New York Life Insurance Company speaks on

the relationship of alcohol to mortality and longevity, and Director Phillip B. Newcomb, of the Osawatomie, Kansas, hospital for the insane reports upon the relationship of alcoholism to mental instability. The same characterization holds true for other divisions of this eight days' meeting on public and private charities, on unemployment and on the promotion of social programs. This year's National Conference shows great willingness to fence off small areas of the social problem and study them intensively.

The committee on corrections, under Dr. Davis' guidance, has arranged a program on the study and treatment of lawbreakers calculated to reveal or emphasize, among others, these four important factors: the effects of prison life on character, the psychopathic basis of crime, policemen and policewomen as adjuncts of the modern scientific treatment and prevention of crime, and the growing movement to establish farm colonies for petty criminals on short sentences.

The division on public and private charities, under the direction. of Secretary H. H. Shirer, of the Ohio Board of State Charities, will conduct five discussions that bear immediately on public policy-an unusually timely symposium. A sixth meeting, on libraries in institutions, is the outcome of a feeling that has been welling up among progressive librarians, that institution workers have been neglecting this branch of the service. This discussion of library work also is an example of the way the old-time and often overlooked problems of institution administration may be warmed up and made attractive. The main effect of Mr. Shirer's program, however, is in the direction of public policy in relief work and in the maintenance and supervision of institutions.

The series of discussions under the title, "Children" is the outcome of a strong feeling manifested at recent meetings of the conference in favor of a thoroughgoing examination of the relation of the public school to child welfare programs and agencies. Miss Julia C. Lathrop and her committee have devoted their meetings exclusively to this subject, from dietary supervision to juvenile courts. The scheme is unique. Seldom, if ever before, has the children's division devoted itself entirely to one aspect of its work. The result will doubtless be an outstanding service to both schools nnd welfare organizations.

The Conference has this year struck out along a new line in the creation of a division on the promotion of social programs. Community programs are not uncommon now in several departments of welfare work. The gospel of co-operation is beginning to be preached

in season and out of season. But a common focus and an equilibrium for these various measures is lacking, as is likewise a mutual understanding about the "wherewithall" of financial support. Mr. Graham Romeyn Taylor and his committee, through a series of leading addresses that cannot avoid being popular, expect to break ground in this new field.

The Conference will open the evening of May 10 with the president's address by Father Francis H. Gavisk, a member of the Indiana board of state charities, followed by a description of war relief methods by Ernest P. Bicknell, civilian director of the American Red Cross. More than 2600 delegates registered at last year's National ConferGreat as it was in every respect, the Indianapolis meeting is expected to take us a long stage farther in working out a comprehensive national program of social betterment.

ence.

THE FIRST REPORTED CRIMINAL TRIAL.

WILLIAM RENWICK RIDDELL.1

In the first of a collection of pamphlets of great age which have been and are read in almost every known tongue, appears an account of the first criminal trial on record.

The crime does not seem to have attracted very much attention among men for some time; but in the first century of our era it was made the object of much study by the most superb theologian the world has ever seen. His powerful writings were adopted as expressing at least one aspect of the theology of a nascent religious body, and when that religion conquered a great and the best part of the world, his theology went with the conqueror.

Even before this, the story had received some attention at the hands of a small and somewhat obscure nation living in Western Asia, but the result of their care did not make itself appreciably manifest in the world outside.

His Master never, so far as we know, made any mention of the crime or the criminal, but Paul made the story of the crime, its punishment and its effects the foundation upon which to build a symmetrical and logical system. The Story of Adam and his Fall has consequently become an integral part of the apparatus of religion; by necessary consequence it has been mentioned with bated breath, mysticism has grown about it, and seldom has it been discussed but with conventional reverence.

I was brought up to believe implicitly in the story. I do not however, in this paper intend to discuss the question of its historical truth or to express any opinion in that regard. Nor shall I allow the glamour of the story to blind the eye to the precise language employed and the precise facts alleged. In other words I propose to take the story as a purely human document and to examine it from the point of view of the lawyer only-the purely legal point of view. This will enable us to see one of the many sides the narrative possesses, and it cannot affect the faith of those who regard it as veridical.

The story found its first expression (so far as we can be certain) in the Hebrew language; but long before the Masoretes had supplied the vowel points and when Hebrew was written only in its consonants, a number of Hebrew scholars translated the account into that form

'Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario.

of Greek in vogue in certain circles in Alexandria. Whether this was to gratify the curiosity of a King of literary tastes, to satisfy the religious needs of the Alexandrian Jews, or to attract converts among those who could not read Hebrew, we need not enquire. That the translation was by competent scholars we cannot doubt, that it was faithful to the text as understood and accepted in the third century before Christ may be taken as equally certain, while the Greek though not that of Xenophon or Thucydides, is the Greek of the commerce and international intercourse of the time, spoken generally throughout the dominion of the Greek Kings, successors of Alexander the Great.

Not having critical knowledge of Hebrew, I am not competent to decide whether changes have been made in the original text, and if any, what; but I adopt as a fair representation of the meaning of the original text, what is expressed in the Septuagint. Translation from this text will also enable us to get rid of traditional terminology, which almost invariably carries with it association, connotation which may for us becloud the real meaning.

It is said that the Hebrew text is a combination of two or more separate narratives. Whether that is so or not I leave to competent critics. The text as it reads in the Septuagint is congruous enough and does not necessitate any dichotomy or trichotomy of source.

One of the very pest methods of finding out exactly what any writing means to anyone is to see how the reader expresses in a foreigr tongue the meaning he draws from the text. No better way, 1 venture to think, can be found to show precisely what the learned Jews understood their sacred writings to mean than to see what is the precise meaning of the Greek into which they translated them.

I therefore take the Septuagint as expressing accurately what the Jew believed his Scripture to say.

The edition I read is the Oxford Edition of 1859 published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, edited by Frederic! Field, Fellow of Trinity Colledge, Cambridge. The translation i my own, as nearly literal as the idioms of the two languages, Greek an English, permit, and claiming no other excellence. (I use the Hebrev. "Yahweh" instead of the Greek "Kurios," as it is certain that the Jew did not think of his God as "Kurios", but it is likely did thin!. of him as "Yahweh" or something very like that.

The account begins with the pre-creation condition of the universe, then comes the Creation, and the story continues thus:

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"And the God said, Let us make man in our own image and in our own likeness And the God made man, made him in God': image, male and female made he them ***and the God fashione