ot tolerate the red flag on the open street."

The French bourgeois have found in Fallieres their fitting man of straw
for seven years.

[Illustration]

The only genuine Democrat of these times is Death. He does not admit of
any class distinctions. He mows down a proletarian and a Marshall Field
with the same scythe. How imperfectly the world is arranged. It should
be possible to shift the bearing of children and the dying from the rich
to the poor--for good pay, of course.

[Illustration]

Whosoever believes that the law is infallible and can bring about order
in the chaotic social conditions, knows the curative effect of law to
the minutest detail. The question how things might be improved is met
with this reply: "All criminals should be caught in a net like fish and
put away for safe keeping, so that society remains in the care of the
righteous." Hallelujah!

People with a capacity to judge for themselves think differently. Mr.
Charlton T. Lewis, President of the National Prison Association,
maintains:

"Our county jails everywhere are the schools and colleges of crime. In
the light of social science it were better for the world if every one of
them were destroyed than that this work should be continued. Experience
shows that the system of imprisonment of minor offenders for short terms
is but a gigantic measure for the manufacture of criminals. Freedom, not
confinement, is the natural state of man, and the only condition under
which influences for reformation can have their full efficiency....
Prison life is unnatural at best. Man is a social creature. Confinement
tends to lower his consciousness of dignity and responsibility, to
weaken the motives which govern his relations to his race, to impair the
foundations of character and unfit him for independent life. To consign
a man to prison is commonly to enrol him in the criminal class.... With
all the solemnity and emphasis of which I am capable, I utter the
profound conviction, after twenty years of constant study of our prison
population, that more than nine-tenths of them ought never to have been
confined."

Government and authority are responsible for the conditions in the
western mining districts.

Is not the existence of government considered as a necessity on the
grounds that it is here to maintain peace, law and order? This is an
oft-repeated song.

Let us see how the government of Colorado has lived up to its calling
within the last few years.