Infantile disobedience and full-fledged crime seem far apart, but they are united by an inward deteriorating process, an outward chain of trespasses more or less petty. The links are all there, connecting the tender babe and fascinating street-arab with the thief and murderer. Similarly, on the moral plane, flow the sequences of cause and effect that bring retribution—that inalienable feature of the law of evolution. The crime that society deplores is the natural penalty for society’s neglect of children; and there is no escape from the penalty as long as the cause continues. Nor can society plead ignorance here. Herbert Spencer and Ruskin have spoken out plainly on this subject. “What we need is cessation from all these antagonisms which keep alive the brutal elements of human nature, and persistence in a peaceful life, giving unchequered play to the sympathies.” (_Herbert Spencer on Arbitration._) “It is,” says Ruskin, “the lightest way of killing to stop a man’s breath. But if you bind up his thoughts by lack of true education, if you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body and blast his soul ... this you think no sin!” Verily, there _is sin_, acknowledged by the noblest, wisest of men, and brought home to us on the lips of babes—“Why kill the man, since when he is dead we can never make him good again!” Society has to compass the task of making men good from the beginning; and in exceptional cases, where the task is impossible, the victims are simply society’s patients, to be impounded without hurt. We are as able to protect our social life from moral as from mental lunatics. The initial step, however (hardly yet taken), is to pass from the mental attitude of a barbarous race, whose habits of defence are those of arbitrary punishment, to that of a civilized nation bent on reforming its criminals, and treating its morally diseased members with uniform humanity and brotherly love. As yet the resources of man’s reason and scientific knowledge and aptitude have never been called into play to devise a system of consecutive restraints on the “brutal elements,” a system to make men good from the beginning by “working out the beast.”