It might be urged that in the case of the family of the Jukes their crime was due to imitations of bad habits kept up in the isolated district in which they lived. It must be at once granted that much of their crime and pauperism was no doubt due to bad upbringing, and the polluted moral atmosphere in which they lived; nevertheless, we are justified in believing in the existence of such a thing as innate want of moral backbone, of which they were a probable example. We have not to go far to find in our everyday experience of life that out of a family whose members are most of them docile, yielding to discipline, and capable of affection and self-sacrifice, one or two, perhaps, seem by nature to be wanting in these qualities. Such sporadic cases are only to be explained on the ground that imperfections in their ancestry have cropped up in the new generation, for the criminal taint is a fact to be observed and accounted for like any so-called physical peculiarity of form or feature. It follows, too, that we are bound to look with the greatest pity and commiseration upon the inveterate criminal as upon a person diseased, and that we should use our best endeavour to prevent the recurrence or continued permanence of such a type. _Segregation of the Criminal an Ultimate and Effectual Resort._ We, therefore, come face to face with the necessity for practical action on our own part if we would fulfil our obligations to those who will come after us. As Pike remarks,[23] “Perpetual imprisonment of the irreclaimable--imprisonment not only nominally but really for life--would be among many causes of that change in the general tone of society which is shown by history to be the greatest preventive of crime as now understood. Like persons affected with scarlet fever or other infectious maladies, the propagandist criminal should be confined in his proper hospital--a prison--and if incurable should be detained until his death. Like phthisis or other hereditary disease, the criminal disposition would in the end cease to be inherited, if all who were tainted with it were compelled to live and die childless. The remedy may be painful, and even cruel, but perhaps greater cruelty and greater pain may be inflicted by the neglect which leaves physical and social ills to spread themselves unchecked.”