erk for a term of
ninety days with the distinct understanding that he was to spend his
enforced vacation in the society of thieves and cutthroats, and at the
end of the time be taken back again into his old place as though nothing
had happened. The railroad president who should discharge a drunken
engineer, and then after six months give him hold of his old throttle
again, although it was in evidence that he had spent his retirement in a
whiskey saloon, studying under competent tuition the latest methods of
holding up trains, would be very apt to be bundled off at the next
meeting of the board of directors to manage railroads from the inside of
a lunatic asylum. Courts and judges and lawyers are about the only
people on the outside that do business in that way.

Is there no help for this state of things? Must the machinery of justice
go on forever grinding over the same vile grist, retrying and
reimprisoning old offenders, cultivating rather than repressing the
law-breaking instinct, passing on to still lower depths of depravity the
soul once caught in the meshes of crime, and at last dragging the great
masses of offenders down to one common level of hopeless and helpless
hostility to social order and law?

It is, of course, much easier to point out faults than to suggest
effective remedies. I am persuaded that some happy inspiration of
genius will yet give us methods, probably so simple that we shall wonder
that they have not always been used, by which many of the gravest evils
which disgrace our present system will be effectually removed. I think
the key to the whole problem will ultimately be found in one
word--_segregation_. Worcester defines "to segregate" "to gather in a
flock, to set apart, to separate from others."

In pursuance of this idea let us suppose, save in the case of certain
crimes that disclose confirmed and hopelessly vicious tendencies, that
all first offenders were counted in a class by themselves. For these
reformatories should be built, in which a complete segregation of the
various classes of law-breakers should be made, and that, too, with the
same idea uppermost which prevails in modern hospital practice, that
infectious cases should in all instances be especially isolated.
Criminal infection is as real and morally quite as disastrous as is
physically that of cholera or smallpox. So with this predominating idea
of segregation; and with a wise discrimination which might be difficult
in the b