of a whole district in order that out of that wreckage he might build himself up an enormous fortune. He is not a burglar from the technical standpoint, he is not a thief that a policeman might catch hold of, but in the sight of karma, and in the sight of the eternal justice, that man who by legal means has robbed thousands of others of their means of livelihood is a worse thief than the one who has picked a pocket and is thrown into jail. There are a good many things in a civilised country which lie very nearly along the line of legal or illegal theft, a good deal of which goes by the name of company-promoting, where it is just a toss-up whether there is really fraud that can be proved; but with the remarkable fact that while the companies always perish, and the people who took shares are beggared, the company-promoter comes out at the top, and becomes quite a successful person. Now all that, from the social standpoint, is utterly immoral, but we cannot call them criminals in the technical sense, although now and then they go a little too far, and then the criminal law catches them. How should those be dealt with who are really the young souls? how shall we avoid turning them into habitual criminals as we do now?—for is there anything more miserable and more shameful than that a man should go back time after time till fifty, sixty convictions are registered against him in the police court, and the sentence grows longer and longer because he is a habitual criminal? He has been manufactured into that. You ought not to treat a man who has committed a crime against your legal system by consigning him to prison for seven days, or a month, or a year, growing longer and longer and longer after every return to temporary freedom. You don’t use people who are ill like that; you never find a doctor committing a small-pox patient to a hospital for seven days, nor a fever-stricken one for a month; they are committed until they are cured, and that is the way in which you should deal with anyone of marked criminal propensities. You should not punish, you should only help; and you should take that child-soul and train him into decency of living. For one thing, you should never have in your prisons any form of useless labour as a punishment. The criminal who is really a savage always dislikes labour; he is always idle—that is part of his youth; and if you give him a form of labour that is punitive and not useful, you only increase his natural disgust for every kind of labour, and make him hate it more thoroughly when he comes out of jail than he did when he went in. Taking up shot and carrying it to one side of the prison yard, and then carrying it back again, or the useless torture of the treadmill, these make criminals, they do not cure them.[1] You want, when the criminal comes into your power, to take him in hand as you would take a younger brother who does not know how to guide himself, and it