gather facts and draw deductions,
especially as to the cause of crime. Prisoners are interested in only
one thing, and that is getting out. They understand perfectly well what
kind of statistics the chaplain wants and these are given. It is the
nature and part of the protective instinct of everyone to find some
excuse for his acts. Alcohol has always furnished this excuse. It is a
good alibi; it is readily believed, always awakens sympathy and at once
turns the wrath of a provincial community from the inmate of the prison
to the saloon-keeper.

Even if prisoners were unlike others and wished to tell the truth about
themselves, they have not the art and understanding to give the causes
of their plight. No man, however intelligent, can do this, least of all
one of inferior brain power, little education and not trained in dealing
with facts. The prison inmate, like everyone else, knows only that he
followed what seemed to him the line of least resistance, and that every
step in his course was preceded by another and that there was a reason
for what he did. Most likely he does not know the reason. In the hours
of his despair he goes over his life in every detail, at every
crossroad, and at all the forks where paths branch, always wishing he
had gone the other way.

While this is true, he could know neither the dangers that lurked along
other roads, nor the fact that he had no choice about the way he went.
All he knows is that he stumbled along a certain path which led to
disaster. All the paths of life lead to tragedy; it is only a question
as to how and when. With some, the evil day is longer delayed and the
disaster seems not so hard to bear.

In a sense, all the classifications as to the cause of crime are
misleading and worthless. Your existence is the result of infinite
chances and causes appalling in their number. Out of a thousand eggs,
one is fertilized by perhaps one of a billion sperms, and from this you
have been given life. Each of your parents and grandparents and so on,
back for two hundred thousand years of human ancestors, and back to
infinity before man was born, was the result of the same seemingly blind
and almost impossible hazard. The infinitely microscopic chance that
each of us had for life cannot be approximated. All the drops of water
in the ocean, or all the grains of sand upon the shore, or all the
leaves on all the trees, if converted into numbers and used as a
denominator, with one for a nume