Page:New penal code of Siam (Masao T, 1908).pdf/10

 ing the French Revolution. It is one of those things that were adopted at that period to safeguard the people against the tyranny of the officials. While the English system is no doubt a most excellent system for England, it does not follow, necessarily, that it will prove itself to be so for any other country; and while the French system ties up the Judge too much and has, no doubt, other defects as well, it cannot be denied that it has some excellent points. The English system requires a staff of most superior judges such as are found in England, who may be said to be almost superhuman. The French system is workable with any judges who have received a fair amount of training. If a choice had to be made between the two systems to begin a new experiment, the cautious man would have no hesitation in choosing the French system to begin with. If the French system is modified in such a way that the limits, within which the maximum and minimum of a punishment are prescribed, are not made too narrow, a great deal of the objection against the system disappears, while the commendable features of the system are kept intact. The system of maximum and minimum punishments adopted in the new Penal Code of Siam is just such a modified form of the French system.

The new Penal Code of Siam discards a principle which is common to Continental Penal Codes but unknown to English law and passes under the name of “Cumulation of Offences.” This principle means that where an offender has accumulated several offences such as theft committed at one place, fraud committed at another place, etc., for which he has not yet been punished, he is, on being tried and sentenced for all these offences together, to receive the punishment provided for the most serious one only, as is the case with the French Code of Criminal Procedure, or is to receive the punishment provided for the most serious one plus one-fourth or one-third, etc., of the punishments provided for the rest, as is the case with the new Japanese Penal Code. This again reflects the spirit of the period following the French Revolution. The defenders of this system usually rely on philosophical grounds of an extremely speculative kind, namely, that the criminality of an