Natural laws rule the world. It is a mistake to believe that the conduct of man is outside of natural law. The laws of being that move all the sentient world rule him. His first impulse is to preserve his life, and his next to preserve the species. Nature planted these instincts so deeply in his being that no civilization can root them up. To destroy these instincts would be to destroy the human race. The first instinct of man is to preserve his life. To do this he must obtain the food, shelter and raiment that enable him to live. His constant effort has been ever to get these at the smallest expenditure of time and strength. In a semi-coöperative state like ours the strongest choose the easiest, most remunerative occupations society can bestow. The less fortunate the next best, and so on down the scale. At the lowest place some are forced to abject toil, to practical slavery, to beggary, to crime. Men would not steal sheep if they had land on which to raise mutton. Men would not explore their neighbor’s houses at dead of night, if their own were filled; and women would not sell their bodies if society left them any other fairly decent and pleasant way to live. Even if punishment by the state could ever be justified, no man is wise enough or good enough to administer that punishment. It is the theory of the law that by means of its magical wisdom it is enabled to fix a code enumerating the acts that are sufficiently evil to constitute a crime; and for each of these enumerated acts it sets a penalty which it presumes is sufficiently severe and drastic to in some mysterious way atone for, excuse, absolve or at least in some way make right, or certainly make better the commission of the act. Punishment must proceed upon the theory that some are wilfully bad, possessed of devils, and the bad must be punished when found bad, to prevent others who are bad from committing crime. Men could only be punished because they were wilfully bad. If men are part good and part bad it will not do to punish. How could the law or courts fix the exact line as to how bad a man might be to deserve punishment, and how good to excuse it? Neither is it the act that should be punished, for it would be a hard and cruel and strange code of negative ethics that should say that a man should be punished for an evil act and not be rewarded for a virtuous one; and even judges might find difficulty in balancing the good and bad; and besides, does not the law in its wisdom say that an evil act shall be punished regardless of its consequences? I may steal my neighbor’s horse at night and return it in the morning. I am none the less a thief and my home is the prison. I may burglarize a safe and find it empty, but the crime has been completed and it deserves the penitentiary. In each case I deserve the penitentiary because my heart is bad. Thus the old theory is the only one on which the believer in punishment could rest for a moment, that some men are bad and