From 323 to 354 B.C., Spartan youth were most carefully schooled by State agents in promiscuous sneak-thievery. Petty thieving by the lads of Greece was then considered a necessary accomplishment. More than that, the boy who came back empty-handed from a foraging expedition, was brutally punished, even unto death. With germane facts of comparatively recent history in mind, the "correspondent" probably wouldn't have been guilty of assertion so grossly incorrect; yet the fact remains that loosest of declaration has for long years been employed by a certain class of writers, in furtherance of impish itch for cheap, if ephemeral prominence. Furthermore, for a State directly to put limited stamps of approval on its young thieves, as did the agents of Lycurgus, would be but one of many ways by which to establish them; in very truth, the indirect method of doing so is hands over the most pernicious and far-reaching method. The most expeditious anti-social job of the latter kind is done as it is being done the country over in the United States; which is to say: maim the criminal law until it goes on crutches, and at the same time order prison régimes to square with the instinctive reactions of lawbreakers. That is to play both ends against the public security; and that is precisely the condition with which the American people are confronted. To tale off a summary of associated influences would crowd a bulking volume. Also, it would yield what mostly wasted effort yields, since Americans have been fully cognizant of the constantly widening cracks in the national structure, as well as of the manner in which those openings have been effected. He knows that neither added nor rescinded statutes can eliminate bad lines of blood, established mainly by an immigration policy framed and executed as if to establish those lines of blood. Hundreds of thousands of those of the "lines" are daily plying disruptive wares; wares which they will continue to ply, more or less, unto at least the fifth generation ahead. A country cannot sit up of a sudden and determine to serve overnight antidote for the slow poison of its people. He knows class legislation is deadly to democracy; yet he sits supinely tight while organized labor successfully clubs with votes for special privileges, successively the more indefensible. He knows the avaricious brute is at the bottom of all of war, and he knows blood-letting within such as the sixteen-foot prize ring is the cruelest of war in miniature. Nevertheless, he piles his own dollars on the pyramid of dollars pulled down annually by the pug-ugly fraternity, the while winking the nether eye as his own kiddies are imbued, through suggestion and example, with the spirit of the fistic parasite.