When, as at present, it comes to the point where habitual parasites of the "pug" variety are held up to the youth of the land by governmental honorables, as exemplars of all a lad should be and strive for, it is time to call check; and if the grossly overdone sporting proclivities of men do not strike in, perhaps the fact that the women of the "honorables" also stand sponsor for first-driving drones, will do so. Looking at the matter in the large, what is it if not morally criminal to babble in one breath about "disarmament," and in the next breath imbue lads and lassies with the ideals of the shouldering hog, and the instincts of the boss bull? Where else than in the moral gutter should a nation expect to land, which goes out of its way to heroize thinly veneered parasites, and plays up to out and out cheats of the same breed? The American people have their work cut out to arrest that for which they have bidden, put up, put down, and put through; which is to say: to snap social handcuffs on those who advisedly prey upon the weak crotchets and vicious curves of their kind. Adding to the germane tens of thousands of flouted laws wont do it; nor will anything short of a purging of the social conscience. Moreover, the purging will begin necessarily at the mother's knee, and extend through the plastic years. America heads for the shallows because she took on the impossible task of making over habit-marked grown-ups, bidden to her bosom from the scrap heaps of nations. Now, she may tack quickly or take her medicine, prescribed by past masters at brute-struck quackery. So, without end, we might specify and elaborate. The crucial point is that the public sees capital menace to the public safety only in the acts of the crassest of felonious offenders: whereas much more of fateful consequence resides in the morally unclean machinations of those who practically shove human pawns to the first lines of criminal attack. Were all imprisoned, petty thieves in the land turned loose, and jail sentence given their equivalent in numbers of those at the top who make a business of breaking moral law, the basic steps would be taken at once to stop the criminal and solve the crime problem. The foraging criminal holds that he at least takes the gambler's chance, while swivel-chair cheats "stack" and deal themselves sure-thing financial aces. In so far as that fact justifies the small-fry felon, he is justified. Some allowance should be made for tainted-in-blood, gutter bred, falsely-environed social misfits, who are driven more or less to selection of the tools of the savage. Contrariwise, there is no defense of the well-born, well-brought-up man who descends in his dealings with his fellowmen to the level of the card shark. Yet even the latter is light in the dark as compared with the public character who affects sporting pugs, pirates, and parasites. When not a fit subject for the alienists, such an one is overdue for political death.