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 more 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 always take the hues and aspect of the country in which they are committed. 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 disgrace 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 without foul air, so many crimes cannot prevail without wide-spread moral
