ON THE CAUSES OF CRIME. 59 i 



hardly recall a case where I do not feel that I might have fallen as my 

 fellow-men have done if I had been subject to the same demoralizing 

 influences, and pressed by the same temptations. I repeat here what 

 I have said on other occasions that, after a long experience with 

 men in all conditions of life, after having felt, as most men, the harsh 

 injustice springing from the strife and passion of the world, I have 

 learned to think mox - e kindly of the hearts of men, and to think less of 

 their heads. If we find that crimes are in a large degree the hot-bed 

 growth of social influences ; if the weakness of human nature is always 

 open to their attacks; if they may at any time enter into our homes 

 and strike at our family then we must at least guard against them as 

 we do the pestilence. To protect the public health and to learn the 

 laws of life, we build and sustain with liberal hand hospitals where 

 the sick and wounded can be cured. The moral hospital should be 

 regarded with an equal interest. In each of them we should seek to 

 cure the inmates. In each of them we should seek to find out the 

 secret cause of disease. With regard to both we should in a large- 

 minded way feel that the laws of moral and physical life are a thousand 

 times more important to the multitudes of the world at large than 

 they are to the few inmates that languish in their gloomy walls. The 

 public hold in high honor the man of science who treads the walks of 

 the hospital to find out the facts which will enable him to ward off 

 sickness and death from others. This Association appeals to the 

 public for the same sympathy and support for those who labor to lift 

 up their unhappy brethren from moral degradation, and at the same 

 time to do the greater work of tracing out the springs and sources of 

 crime, and of warning the public of its share of guilt in sowing the 

 seeds of immorality by its tastes, maxims, and usages. "We love to 

 think that the inmates of cells are unlike ourselves. We should like 

 to disown our common humanity with the downcast and depraved. 

 We are apt to thank God we are not like other men ; but, with closer 

 study and deeper thought, we find they are ourselves under different 

 circumstances, and the circumstances that made them what they are 

 abound in our civilization, and may at any time make others fall who 

 do not dream of danger. It is a mistake when we hold that criminals 

 are merely perverse men, who are at war with social influences. On 

 the other hand, they are the outgrowth of these influences. Crimes al- 

 ways take the hues and aspect of the country in which they are com- 

 mitted. They show not only guilty men but a guilty people. The 

 world holds those nations to be debased where crime abounds. It 

 does not merely say that the laws are defective and the judges corrupt, 

 but charges the guilt home to the whole society. This is just, for 

 most of the crimes which disc-race us could not be done if there were 

 not an indifference to their causes on the part of the community. As 

 certain plagues which sweep men into their graves cannot rage with- 

 out foul air, so many crimes cannot prevail without wide-spread moral 



