America holds the world's record for recidivistic criminals. She will continue to hold that record so long as she puts up with the play-house prison, call the house by what name you will, and place it in the prison chain as you may. While thinking of the house, and of the work tax payers pay for it to do, ponder very carefully this deep-digging declaration by Ignatius Loyola, S. J.: "Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh year, and I don't care who instructs him after that." Probably beyond that which Loyola meant to convey, America's elementary penological lesson is plainly written in his words; a lesson America should have learned by heart and heeded, decades ago. It is that she must, absolutely must, close her doors and keep them closed to natural breeders alike of criminals, and agitators against the public peace and security; then search out and deport such "natural breeders" who have sieved, willy-nilly, into the land. Cures for habitual criminals seldom cure; correctional quackery, never. Also, when a lad shall have passed the "seventh year" by seven years, and from his first conscious thought had been given habitually to unlawful selection; and further, shall have come congenitally by predisposition for such selection, the merry-go-round correctional plant is the last place on earth wherein amelioration of his plight will be effected. Young as he is, he will elect and maneuver for a criminal career, unless he is consistently subjected to schooling stripped of suggestion of crooks and crookedness. Plenty of play in the wide open an imprisoned lad must have. Attempt to fit a man's head to a lad's shoulders is indefensible error; but the play should be wholesome play purged of the "pug"; it should be fixed in his mind as relatively incidental to basic measures of reform, and it should not be allowed to cross those measures. As for the rest, "For forms of government, let fools contest; that which is best administered is best," provided: the "form of government" runs true to the form demanded by the intrinsic social exactions upon a lad. Contrariwise, attempt such as to make farmers out of young men whose urban life has been decided by every natural circumstance, is at once waste of time, material and human potential, and to fly in the face of geographic destiny. City-bred felons will take on just so much of farming as compulsion compels, or the ulterior motive dictates, and not a stroke at it more. If you question the above assertion, ask any farmer who has tried out the ex-prisoner farmer who was city-bred.