So long as such conditions obtain in America, so long will recidivistic criminals mount there in numbers; and so long will they justify themselves to themselves, and to all who will listen to their half-baked contentions. "I see and approve the good--I follow the bad," says a far-famed poet, whose bold declaration of spineless principle leaves him spokesman for thousands of moral weaklings who are always on the fence, undecisive as to which way to jump. It also leaves him open to the charge of angling for a cheap, dirt-distributing notoriety. Another, ostensibly an editor of a New England newspaper--shades of the Pilgrims stand by--flares at men of the cloth who denounce such as the late bestial scandal enacted at Jersey City. He is "convinced" that Catholic and Protestant ministers are "impugning motives here and blackening character there, because they have lost their tempers at the disinclination of the people to follow them." Passing motives "impugned" by the Infinite Mind, and character "blackened" with the devil's own smudge, what would the scribe have vicars of God Almighty do? What the implication of his own monstrous and most illogical libel, if not that those on whom America does and must rely for moral guidance, should remain as mentally shackled, and morally blind, while blacklegs and backsliders establish schools for crime, and write the texts books for them? Hardly! True Americans of the "people" for whom the gentleman assumes to speak, wax fatuous, not to say fat-headed betimes; but let us hope that they may be relied upon finally to search out and set down those who would yield American birth-right for the brew of the base at heart. If the sporting-soaked must utter and shove counterfeit moral coin, they owe it to common decency not to affect the mantle of the mentor; they specifically do, because predal parasites bank on being able to point to them as having said and done the last fool thing. They further do, for the reason that they are the readiest gulls of the grafting gang they champion. Moral thieves are moral morons. Count them, and get the cut of the saw of the "Passaic News." IV THE PSYCHIATRIST Webster defines psychology as "The science of the human soul; specifically, the systematic and scientific knowledge of the powers and functions of the human soul, in so far as they are known to consciousness; a treatise on the human soul." Modified by the phrase, "in so far as they are known to consciousness," that definition will do, albeit we have arrived at but little "knowledge" of the "_powers_ and functions of the human _soul_," and at less of prescience that accounts for the by-choice criminal. Then, too, distinction must be made as between the finite limitations of the brain of flesh, and the infinite reach of the "soul" of man. In any case, let us not cough over a too nice fitting of technical terms; but envisage, in the broad, the matter of mental research and healing.