All energy manifests itself along lines of least resistance, and the first energies of man are devoted to the procurement of the means of life. It is only where organized tyranny has made violence and force the line of least resistance that men will deviate from the normal path, and so long as the cupidity and brutal selfishness of man shall make this the line of least resistance, all the laws on earth cannot overcome the primal instincts and feelings upon which life depends. A race that would starve, or beg, or accept alms before violating the brutal laws that fence the children of nature from their source of life, would quickly degenerate into abject slavery and finally into nothingness. All so-called criminals do not reason out the cause that placed them where they are. Instinctively they feel that they are doing what they must. This class have generally lived for years, sometimes for generations, so near the border line, have lived such precarious lives that their callings and avocations have grown as natural and normal as monopolizing the earth has grown to another class. They are fully aware of the dangers incident to their craft, of the scanty recompense that their lives afford, and, like all other men, would at once abandon their calling for an opportunity to lead more normal lives. They are in no sense devoid of these common instincts of humanity upon which nature rests all life. Given a child falling into a river, an old person in a burning building, a woman fainting in the street, and a band of convicts would risk their lives to give aid as quickly at least as a band of millionaires. * * * * * Nature takes little account of atoms, her operations are on a wide field, a broad scale. She brings famine, a million men must die; she does not seem to pick out the individual men—she draws a straight hard line, and those who step across cannot return. Nature and man combine to make hard the condition of human life for the great majority that live upon the earth. A very few choose the roads of luxury and ease; the vast mass are scattered in all the avenues of life; some serve by abject toil; some enter the hazardous callings of the railroads and the mines; some the extra hazardous of making gunpowder and nitro-glycerine; and some the still more hazardous—these are thieves or burglars or robbers or prostitutes, as the case may be. Conditions improve, and man moves up in the scale; the toilers have greater luxury; those in hazardous callings take an easier place; the extra hazardous rise to the hazardous; and the still more hazardous to the extra hazardous. The conditions of life become more severe and the current flows the other way. It is then that the jails and the penitentiaries are crowded to the utmost limit they will hold.