What if fathers treated dull or vicious boys in this manner at home--making them infamous for the first offence, or the first dulness, and then refusing to receive them back again? What if the father sent out his son with bad boys, and when he erred and fell, said: "You did mischief with bad boys once; I know they enticed you. I knew you were feeble and could not resist their seductions. But I shall punish you. Do as well as you please, I will not forgive you. If you err again, I will punish you afresh. If you do never so well, you shall be infamous for ever!" What if a public teacher never took back to college a boy who once had broke the academic law--but made him infamous for ever? What if the physicians had kept a patient the requisite time in the hospital, and discharged him as wholly cured, but bid men beware of him and shun him for ever? That is just what we are doing with this class of criminals; not intentionally, not consciously--but doing none the less! Let us look a moment more carefully, though I have already touched on this subject, at the proximate causes of crime in this class of men. The first cause is obvious--poverty. Most of the criminals are from the lowest ranks of society. If you distribute men into three classes, the abounding, the thriving, the perishing, you will find the inmates of your prisons come almost wholly from the latter class. The perishing fill the sink of society, and the dangerous the sink of the perishing--for in that "lowest deep there is a lower depth." Of three thousand one hundred and eighty-eight persons confined in the House of Correction in this city, one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven were foreigners; of the five hundred and fifty sent from this city in five years to the State's Prison, one hundred and eighty-five were foreigners. Of five hundred and forty-seven females in the Prison on Blackwell's Island at one time--five hundred and nineteen were committed for "vagrancy;" women with no capital but their person, with no friend, no shelter. Examine minutely, you shall find that more than nine tenths of all criminals come from the perishing class of men. There all cultivation, intellectual, moral, religious, is at the lowest ebb. They are a class of barbarians; yes, of savages, living in the midst of civilization, but not of it. The fact, that most criminals come from this class, shows that the causes of the crime lie out of them more than in them; that they are victims of society, not foes. The effect of property in elevating and moralizing a class of men is seldom appreciated. Historically the animal man comes before the spiritual. Animal wants are imperious; they must be supplied. The lower you go in the social scale, the more is man subordinated to his animal appetites and demonized by them. Nature aims to preserve the individual and repeat the species--so all passions relative to these two designs are preëminently powerful. If a man is born into the intense life of an