sickly and defective classes, who are often as prolific as they are inefficient. In our civilization these institutions have become a necessity, but their abuse should be carefully guarded against. What is urgently needed are homes or retreats where poor convalescent patients can recuperate after their discharge from the hospital. As it is, such people, in a weakened condition, have no place to seek the needed rest, and either fall victims again to a former disease, or become chronic invalids. Here would seem to be a more fruitful field for philanthropy than the building of additional hospitals. Above all, more of an effort should be made to get at the roots of the cause than to temporize so with the effect. Municipal governments annually devote large sums of money for the care of the sick, the criminal, and the insane, but devote no energy to investigating and striving to prevent the factors that are constantly at work in producing these classes. Here, if ever, an ounce of prevention is equal to many pounds of cure. The Department of Public Charities and Correction of New York city, with its 15,000 wards, received $2,166,237 in 1891, and requests an appropriation of $2,877,245 for 1892. If a part of the money that is annually devoted to keeping alive the helpless and suffering could in some way be diverted toward remedying unhealthy domiciles, relieving overcrowded tenements, dissipating polluted air and foul gases, supplying the best food at cheap rates, educating the masses in the simple principles of hygienic living, closing the saloons, and in many like ways checking the sources of disease and degeneration, this knotty problem would find its best solution. The way we can cure is by preventing. We permit factors to exist that degenerate men physically, mentally, and morally, and then bring up a clumsy, mechanical, outside philanthropy to try and reform by patchwork.
Probably one of the greatest dangers to organized society is found in the criminal classes. The laws of the production and confirmation of criminals, with their treatment, should be among the most thoughtfully studied branches of political science. The number of convicts in penitentiaries in 1880 was 35,538, while in 1890 it was 45,233, an increase in ten years of 9,695, or 27·28 per cent, and during this interval the total population increased only at the rate of 24·86 per cent.[1] Again, the total number of prisoners in county jails in 1880 was 12,691; in 1890, 19,538, an increase in ten years of 6,847, or at the rate of 53·95 per cent.[2] Coming to the inmates of juvenile reformatories, we find the number reported in 1880 was 11,468; in 1890, 14,846, an increase of 3,378, or
