Crowded and kept ignorant in youth, tempted, ill-fed, cold and worried in after years, their lot was hard--and their fall almost inevitable. They must be confined, they must be protected against themselves, they must suffer for the poor start given to them. But the duty of those who are FREE and fortunate is to treat kindly those who fall, and especially to deal in such fashion with the young as shall minimize the crop of weeds later. Fortunately, it may truly be said that humanity begins to realize its responsibilities in both lines of effort. Kindness reaches the convict in his prison. And Education, the thrice blessed AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL, does steadily the work that makes useful plants of growing youth, diminishing year by year the crop of weeds. Kindness and EDUCATION--go to Auburn prison and you will realize how much work they have still to do in our country. CRIME IS DYING OUT Many of us feel that crime is the striking feature of modern life, that this century sits among the skulls of crime's victims, and that Father Time, after all his ages of travel, sees no improvement. But those discouraged by modern crime misunderstand the meaning of events and fail to make a just comparison between the past and the present. It is true that crime to-day is shocking in its frequency. Each day we see spread out before us murders. But first of all remember this: We often mistake widespread NEWS of crime for increase in crime itself. The newspapers are multiplied in number by tens of thousands, and they all tell what happens. It seems as though crime had increased, whereas in reality we have simply increased facilities for letting all the people know what goes on among us. ---- We are shocked occasionally by crimes of poisoning. Go back a few centuries and you find men and women making a regular business of selling poison to those who want to commit murder. The crimes that fill us with horror would not have been noticed in those days. We hear of a father killing his own child, and we declare that humanity is going to destruction. Yet but a few centuries back and THE LAW RECOGNIZED EVERY FATHER'S RIGHT TO KILL HIS CHILD IF HE CHOSE. We shudder when we hear that a mother has exposed a new-born child on a doorstep or thrown it into an ash barrel. That is a horrid and unbelievable crime. But in Rome, before the days of Christianity, there were appointed places where mothers might legally expose their children to destruction. The wild beasts or dogs ate the children thus exposed, and no one was shocked. Whoever might care to take such an exposed child could keep that child for a slave forever. That kind of crime we have outgrown certainly.