Criminal Psychology | Page 5

after our students and workers have tested them in our own experience. But it is certain that we must first acquaint ourselves with these results of a generation of European thought.
In closing, the Committee thinks it desirable to refer the members of the Institute, for purposes of further investigation of the literature, to the ``Preliminary Bibliography of Modern Criminal Law and Criminology'' (Bulletin No. 1 of the Gary Library of Law of Northwestern University), already issued to members of the Conference. The Committee believes that some of the Anglo- American works listed therein will be found useful.
COMMITTEE ON TRANSLATIONS.
Chairman, WM. W. SMITHERS,
_Secretary of the Comparative Law Bureau of the American Bar Association, Philadelphia, Pa_.
ERNST FREUND,
Professor of Law in the University of Chicago. MAURICE PARMELEE,
Professor of Sociology in the State University of Kansas. ROSCOE POUND,
Professor of Law in the University of Chicago. ROBERT B. SCOTT,
Professor of Political Science in the State University of Wisconsin. JOHN H. WIGMORE,
_Professor of Law in Northwestern University, Chicago_.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH VERSION.
WHAT Professor Gross presents in this volume is nothing less than an applied psychology of the judicial processes,--a critical survey of the procedures incident to the administration of justice with due recognition of their intrinsically psychological character, and yet with the insight conferred by a responsible experience with a working system. There is nothing more significant in the history of institutions than their tendency to get in the way of the very purposes which they were devised to meet. The adoration of measures seems to be an ineradicable human trait. Prophets and reformers ever insist upon the values of ideals and ends--the spiritual meanings of things--while the people as naturally drift to the worship of cults and ceremonies, and thus secure the more superficial while losing the deeper satisfactions of a duty performed. So restraining is the formal rigidity of primitive cultures that the mind of man hardly moves within their enforced orbits. In complex societies the conservatism, which is at once profitably conservative and needlessly obstructing, assumes a more intricate, a more evasive, and a more engaging form. In an age for which machinery has accomplished such heroic service, the dependence upon mechanical devices acquires quite unprecedented dimensions. It is compatible with, if not provocative of, a mental indolence,-- an attention to details sufficient to operate the machinery, but a disinclination to think about the principles of the ends of its operation. There is no set of human relations that exhibits more distinctively the issues of these undesirable tendencies than those which the process of law adjusts. We have lost utterly the older sense of a hallowed fealty towards man-made law; we are not suffering from the inflexibility of the Medes and the Persians. We manufacture laws as readily as we do steam-rollers and change their patterns to suit the roads we have to build. But with the profit of our adaptability we are in danger of losing the underlying sense of purpose that inspires and continues to justify measures, and to lose also a certain intimate intercourse with problems of theory and philosophy which is one of the requisites of a professional equipment

and one nowhere better appreciated than in countries loyal to Teutonic ideals of culture. The present volume bears the promise of performing a notable service for English readers by rendering accessible an admirable review of the data and principles germane to the practices of justice as related to their intimate conditioning in the psychological traits of men.
The significant fact in regard to the procedures of justice is that they are of men, by men, and for men. Any attempt to eliminate unduly the human element, or to esteem a system apart from its adaptation to the psychology of human traits as they serve the ends of justice, is likely to result in a machine-made justice and a mechanical administration. As a means of furthering the plasticity of the law, of infusing it with a large human vitality--a movement of large scope in which religion and ethics, economics and sociology are worthily cooperating--the psychology of the party of the first part and the party of the second part may well be considered. The psychology of the judge enters into the consideration as influentially as the psychology of the offender. The many- sidedness of the problems thus unified in a common application is worthy of emphasis. There is the problem of evidence: the ability of a witness to observe and recount an incident, and the distortions to which such report is liable through errors of sense, confusion of inference with observation, weakness of judgment, prepossession, emotional interest, excitement, or an abnormal mental condition. It is the author's view that the judge should understand these relations not merely in their narrower practical bearings, but in their larger and more theoretical aspects