can be attended to at once. Some are morally diseased, but may be cured,
and the best powers of society will be used to cure them. Some are only
morally diseased because of the conditions in which they are born and
reared, and here society can save millions at once.

An intelligent society will no more neglect its children than an
intelligent mother will neglect her children; and will see as clearly
that ill-fed, ill-dressed, ill-taught and vilely associated little ones
must grow up gravely injured.

As a matter of fact we make our crop of criminals, just as we make our
idiots, blind, crippled, and generally defective. Everyone is a baby
first, and a baby is not a criminal, unless we make it so. It never
would be,--in right conditions. Sometimes a pervert is born, as
sometimes a two-headed calf is born, but they are not common.

The older, simpler forms of crime we may prevent with case and despatch,
but how of the new ones?--big, terrible, far-reaching, wide-spread
crimes, for which we have as yet no names; and before which our old
system of anti-personal punishment falls helpless? What of the crimes
of poisoning a community with bad food; of defiling the water; of
blackening the air; of stealing whole forests? What of the crimes of
working little children; of building and renting tenements that produce
crime and physical disease as well? What of the crime of living on the
wages of fallen women--of hiring men to ruin innocent young girls; of
holding them enslaved and selling them for profit? (These things are
only "misdemeanors" in a man-made world!)

And what about a crime like this; to use the public press to lie to
the public for private ends? No name yet for this crime; much less a
penalty.

And this: To bring worse than leprosy to an innocent clean wife who
loves and trusts you?

Or this: To knowingly plant poison in an unborn child?

No names, for these; no "penalties"; no conceivable penalty that could
touch them.

The whole punishment system falls to the ground before the huge mass of
evil that confronts us. If we saw a procession of air ships flying
over a city and dropping bombs, should we rush madly off after each
one crying, "Catch him! Punish him!" or should we try to stop the
procession?

The time is coming when the very word "crime" will be disused, except in
poems and orations; and "punishment," the word and deed, be obliterated.
We are beginning to learn a little of the nature of humanity