paying the government tax; as long as laws exist which prevent a man from selling that same whiskey on Sunday, there will be offenders against that law; when a man is starving he does not stop to think he is committing a crime in stealing a loaf of bread.

But we do claim that crimes against the well being of society of whatever nature they may be, crimes that originate in the diseased and dwarfed minds of men and women, crimes committed through the agencies of degredation and passion, and crimes that owe their origin to insanity and alcoholic dementia, can be mitigated if not eradicated. That crime is on the increase out of proportion to the population is indicated by the following table taken from the late United States

Von Liszt, of Germany admits "that our existing penal systems are powerless against crime."

In every state in the Union the amount of money appropriated for the punishment of criminals is increasing annually. Jurists and lawmakers confess that they are powerless to better this condition of affairs.

The existing system of criminal law is based upon the ancient idea of vengeance and retaliation in the form of what is known as punish

ment.

According to Blackstone, "No human laws are of any validity if contrary to the law of Nature, and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original."

In spite of the fact that jurists, criminologists, and students of social problems concur in the opinion that crime is a disease, medical men seem to hold aloof from the subject, except in isolated instances. We are spending far too much time and energy in useless, theoretical fancies and far too little in this vital question-the treatment of crime.

Among the causes of crime and the production of criminals, heredity stands prominent. A. M. Holmes, A. M., M. D. says:"Heredity is that law of nature whereby parents transmit to their offspring certain valuable powers, termed 'predispositions' which render their off- ng more or less susceptible to their environment. Heredity is the condition within the body, and environment consists of the influences that act upon it from without. To properly adjust these two

factors is the 'rationale' of individual and organic evolution." Dr. Holmes continuing, says, "If in the sacred laboratory of wedlock we combine these three ingredients-immorality, insanity, and diseasewe must remember that the laws of nature are never false. If the resulting compound is not as we would have it, it is because the proper ingredients were not used." Even Hippocrates wrote, "You will find as a rule that the form of the body and the disposition of the mind correspond to the nature of the country."

We allow criminals to marry, and when they beget criminals we calmly assume an air of resignation and claim that crime is ineradicable. Medical men are advocating the advisability of preventing by law phthisical patients from marrying, as we are certain that the resulting children are predisposed to phthisis. We pity such children because we know they are afflicted from the moment of their conception. But to the individual, burdened with a predisposition towards crime, we act quite differently. When his environment becomes suitable for the development of his moral disease and he commits a crime, we throw him into a prison and carry out to the letter the law of vengeance and retaliation. Is this scientific treatment? Is this the best we can

do in this age of progress?

A child of criminal antecedents is thrown a harmless and nameless waif upon the world. Existing somehow, living with outcasts and criminals, breathing in moral degredation with every breath, he reaches manhood. He commits a capital crime, is arrested and brought to trial before a judge and a jury. From the evidence, the jury finds a verdict of "guilty," and the culprit is brought before the judge for treatment. The judge, solemnly and with a firm conviction that he is doing his duty, gives the following prescription: "to be hung by the neck, until dead."

Can this be considered as the best treatment to follow in every case? Is the condemned man any more deserving of a punishment based on vengeance than a consumptive? He has committed a crime it is true and disturbed the social equilibrium, but is he responsible for that crime? It seems to me that he is a diseased being and badly in need of scientific treatment, not punishment.

I can not agree with those who claim that alcohol is the prime factor in crime, but I do believe it is an important element. If a subject is a born criminal, heredity is the predisposing and alcohol the exciting cause of his ruin.

A man may have inherited criminal instincts by his will power; deaden or destroy that power with alcohol and he is lost.

Criminals, as a class, are intellectually weak and have little power to resist temptation, are passionate and quick to resent a fancied or real

injury. Children, born of alcoholic parents, are nervous wrecks and very impressionable. Surround these children with a criminal environment and their fall is swift and certain.

In a drunken rage a father strikes down his child. Awakening in prison, he finds himself confronted with the charge of murder. To him the whole drama was a blank, but his punishment is just as certain as if he had been in the full possession of his faculties. If in the delirium of typhoid he had committed the crime, the deed would not have been the less horrible, but the law would not have demanded his life. I do not claim that this man should escape the penalty of his work; but I do claim that the treatment of such cases in vogue to-day is unscientific, barbarous, and without foundation in any law human or divine. Public safety demands his removal from society, possibly forever; but let that removal be made in a humane manner in the full understanding of his individual case. Do not hurl him into eternity simply because he is unfortunate enough to be the victim of a dis

ease.

Prisons and reformatories, with few exceptions, prove fertile fields for the propagation of crime and criminals. No effort is made. towards curing the inmates of their disease, but every effort is made to impress upon their minds the fact that they are being punished, that they are outcasts. What can be the results on minds already diseased other than to add fuel to the fire, to make them worse than they are. No distinction is made whatever between the prisoners. A young man suffering the penalty of a crime committed in a moment of folly, comes in contact with the hardened criminal. With a mind already warped by the sense of an undeserved punishment, he becomes an eager pupil of a more eager teacher. His term expiring, he enters the world again, at war with all mankind.

If you think this an exaggeration visit one of our large prisons. Ask the old and hardened victims where they learned their first lessons in crime.

Insanity is a very important factor to be considered in the treatment of crime. Insanity is a term applied to a derangement or abnormal condition of one or more of the mental faculties, without loss of volition or unconsciousness, arising from causes other than bodily disease. In the study of insanity several varieties are recognized. Alcoholic insanity, that induced by alcoholic excess, usually a result of hereditary tendencies; epidemic insanity, a form occasionally manifested among a number of people in common association, as in convents or schools; hereditary insanity, that variety acquired by virtue of hereditary weakness or taint and not induced by other apparent causes; ideational insanity, a term applied to any form in which there is marked

perversion of the reasoning powers; impulsive insanity, a form in which the patient possesses an uncontrollable desire to commit acts of violence; moral insanity, a form marked by perversion and depravity of the moral sense, without impairment of the reasoning and intellectual faculties; primary insanity, a form, often congenital, that arises with the development of the body and which may also proceed from injury or disease of the brain in early life; volitional insanity, such forms as are marked by derangements of the will.

All physicians who have any knowledge of the subject at all, know that the above forms of insanity exist. Does the law recognize such forms?

It is true that criminal lawyers often enter a plea of insanity in the hopes of saving their client from punishment, but are these forms. recognized in the framing of our criminal laws? I think not.

It is a well established fact that waves of suicical insanity spread over certain districts at times and the report of one suicide seems to excite others. It is certainly within the bounds of reason to claim that a parallel wave of criminal insanity may make its presence felt in a community.

In France sexual perversion is recognized by the law an an exciting agent in unnatural crimes, but in this country it is not.

A man, committing a crime during an attack of alcoholic frenzy, receives the same punishment as if he was sane at the moment of the commission of the deed; a moral lunatic commits a deed of violence and is strung up on the limb of a near-by tree, or conducted to a seat in the electrical chair; the victim of impulsive insanity receives the same treatment as the calculating rascal. Is this as it should be?

The part played by hypnotism in crime is still an open question and one that demands a vast amount of careful and unbiased investigation. That something we call "hypnotic power" does exist we can not doubt. Hypnotic suggestion is being used daily by advanced physicians as a means of cure in nervous and mental diseases, and apparently with good results. If this power can be used for good there is a strong probability that it can be used for evil. At any rate in its relation to crime it is an unknown quantity and should be considered.

Ignorance, as a crime producing agent, is worthy of note. Education is the retort in which brute instinct is refined into human understanding. While we do find educated criminals, they are the exception and the exception does not prove the rule. Our country leads the world in educational facilities as far as the masses are concerned. But the employment of young children in factories and work-shops is a custom which is a menace to the well-being of the nation and should be stopped. Thrown on their own resources at an age when their

minds are very receptive, they prove apt pupils, and woe be to them if they meet unprincipled teachers. Burden a child with hereditary taint and put him among evil companions and we can not express surprise at his fall.

Another crime-producing agent is the tenement house curse. There is hardly a city of any size in the country which can but hide its guilty face when charged with the accusation of fostering this great evil. The denizens of a tenement, living in the midst of misery and squalor, enwrapped in folds of dampness and darkness into which a ray of God's sunshine seldom steals, stifling for a breath of fresh air, having a bundle of filthy rags for a bed and a mouldy crust or decaying bone for food, prove willing students in the school of crime.

You say that I paint the picture in darker colors than the original shows in real life? Visit a tenement and learn.

All you who make the laws and execute them, before you sentence to punishment the next victim who comes before you, visit the home (?) in which he was born and grew to adult life. Then confine him within your granite walls and iron bars, and if when you rest your heads upon your pillows at night and dream no dream of injustice done, you may conclude that in your make-up there is lacking one grand quality-charity.

All you physicians who are spending all your idle hours in working out obstruse theories and speculations, ask yourselves if there is not more important work to be done.

The tenement house proves to be a good supporter of the saloon. The inmates find there warmth, company, forgetfulness. The saloon supports the prison, hospital and asylum. To the tenement house victim his glass of gin proves to be the goblet brimmed from Lethe, which brings for a few hours a respite from his misery. Can we blame him for raising it to his lips?

There are many other causes which lead to crime but I have endeavored to confine myself strictly to those with which the physician has to deal. And now for the treatment, first giving place to the opinions of some noted students of the subject. Rondeau says, "Conceding that every crime is the natural outcome and a logical consequence of some disease, its penalty should be nothing less than a medical treatment. Even assassins are patients as well as all other criminals. They should be punished because they disturb the regular course of social life, because they are obstacles to the development of the species."

"In his system of repression all prisons would be transformed into hospitals; no attempt would be made to improve the organization of convicts. The thief and the vagabond would be treated by making