"What?" Jim exploded. "Brought his wife down here? The son of a ——! Say. If my old woman came within ten blocks of the place—or any of the kids—I’d knock their blocks off. Go on. Yer kidding me." When they insisted that it was true, he scratched his head disgustedly and kept reiterating his belief in the chap’s canine ancestry. Two hours later, when I was going out of the Tombs, he stopped me. It was still on his mind. "Say," he said, "what d’ye think of that son of a ——?" *III* It did not take me very long to see that the trouble with our criminal courts goes deeper than the graft or ill-temper of the judges. Day after day the realization grew upon me that the system itself is wrong at bottom. A man can do a vicious thing now and then without complete moral disintegration. It is constant repetition of the act which turns him into a vicious man. Brown may once in a while lose his temper and strike his wife, and still be, on the whole, an estimable fellow. But if he makes a regular habit of blacking her eye every Saturday night, we would hold him suspect in all relations. We would not only question his fitness to bring up children, we would doubt his veracity, distrust him in money matters. The more I have been in court the stronger grows the conviction that there is something inherently vicious in passing criminal judgment on our fellow men. A Carpenter who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago thought on this matter as I do. His doctrine about throwing stones is explicit. If he was right in saying "Judge not," we cannot expect any high morality from our judges. The constant repetition of evil inevitably degrades. Unless we can expect our judges to be omniscient—and no one of them is so fatuous as to believe himself infallible—we are asking them to gamble with justice, to play dice with men’s souls. We give them the whole power of the state to enforce their guesses. The counters with which they play are human beings—not only individual offenders, but whole families, innocent women and children. Such an occupation—as a steady job—will necessarily degrade them. It would change the Christ Himself.... But he said very definitely that He would not do it. However, my work in the Tombs has not made me a pessimist. Science has conquered the old custom of flogging lunatics. The increase of knowledge must inevitably do away with our barbaric penal codes, with cellular confinement and electrocution. An enlightened community will realize that the whole mediæval idea of punishing each other is not only a sin—according to Christ—but a blunder, a rank economic extravagance, as useless as it is costly. We will learn to protect ourselves from the losses and moral contagions of crime as we do from infectious diseases. Our prisons we will discard for hospitals, our judges will become physicians, our "screws" we will turn into trained nurses.