592 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



malaria. It is the greed for gold, the love of luxury in the American 

 people, which have caused the legislative frauds, the municipal corrup- 

 tions, the violations of trust which excite alarm in our land. It is the 

 admiration of wealth, no matter how gained, which incites and embold- 

 ens the desperate speculator in commercial centres to sport with the sa- 

 cred interests of labor, to unsettle the business of honest industry, by 

 playing tricks with the standards of value. Those who use the stocks 

 of great corporations as machines for gambling schemes are more de- 

 liberately and artfully dishonest than the more humble swindler w r ho 

 throws his loaded dice. Many of the transactions of our capitalists are 

 more hurtful to the welfare of our people than the acts of thieves and 

 robbers. In the better days of American simplicity, honesty, and patri- 

 otism, these things could not have been done. No one would then dare 

 to face a people indignant at such rapacious greed. Such influences 

 have led to frauds, defalcations, breaches of trust. They have tilled 

 our prisons and overwhelmed many households with shame and sorrow. 

 Yet the authors of such things are honored for their wealth, and we ask 

 with eagerness how rich do they get, and not how do they get riches. 

 To make the public feel that criminals are men of like passions with 

 ourselves, and that crime is an infectious as well as a malignant dis- 

 ease, that its sources are not so much personal inclination as general 

 demoralization, are the great first steps toward reform. When we feel 

 the disease may enter our own bouses and seize upon the mental and 

 moral weakness of those we love, we are ready to study its causes and 

 its workings. We shall then uphold and honor those men of humanity 

 and true statesmanship who study out the cause of moral stains as we 

 honor and support those men of science who search out in sick-rooms 

 and hospitals the cause, and cure the complaint, which kills the body. 

 He who masters the diagnosis of crime gains a key to the mysteries of 

 our nature and to the secret sources of demoralization which opens to 

 him a knowledge of the great principles of public and private reform 

 the true methods of a good administration of the laws. Pauperism 

 and crime have been the subjects of earnest thought by the best and 

 wisest men of the world, not only on account of their direct interest, 

 but also on account of their relationship to all other matters of good 

 government. Neither of them can be driven out of existence. They 

 will always be problems to vex statesmanship, but they must always 

 be battled with. In the social edifice they are like fires ever kindling 

 in its different parts, which are to be kept under by watchfulness and 

 oare. If neglected, they burst out into the flames of anarchy and revo- 

 lution, and sweep away forms of government. These subjects must be 

 studied directly, and in their moral aspects. There is a pervading idea 

 in our country, that the spread of knowledge will check crime. No 

 one values learning more than I do ; but it is no specific for immorality 

 and vice. Without moral and religious training, it frequently becomes 

 an aid to crime. Science, mechanical skill, a knowledge of business- 



