means, so far as his own person is concerned, of cheating the devil of his due. As the Church has uniformly consigned great inventors to the infernal regions, his Satanic Majesty could have never had any lack of ingenious wits among his subjects capable of advising him in such matters. An important consideration, which did not disturb the minds of mediæval jurists, nor stay the hand of strictly retributive justice, is the fact, now generally admitted, that crimes, like all other human actions, are subject to certain fixed laws, which seem to some extent to remove them from the province of free will and the power of individual determination. Professor Morselli has shown statistically that suicide, which we are wont to consider a wholly voluntary act, is really dependent upon a great variety of circumstances, over which man has no control: climate, seasons, months, days, state of crops, domestic, social, political, financial, economical, geographical and meteorological conditions, sun, moon, and stars all work together, impelling him to self-destruction or keeping him from it. Suicide increases when the earth is in aphelion, and decreases when it is in perihelion. Race and religion are also important factors in aggravating or mitigating the suicidal tendency, Germans and Protestants being most, and Semitic nations and Mohammedans, including those of Aryan and African blood, being least addicted to it. Suicide is, in fact, the resultant of a vast number of complicated and far-reaching forces, which we can neither trace nor measure, and of which the victims themselves are for the most part unconscious. To a very considerable degree, it is a question of environment in the broadest sense of the term; “an effect,” says Morselli, “of the struggle for existence and of human selection, working according to the laws of evolution among civilized peoples.” What is proved to be true of self-slaughter is equally so of murder and every other crime. An additional reflection, that “must give us pause” in the presence of crime, is that some of the chief causes operating to produce the manifold evils afflicting society and threatening to subvert it, are due in a great measure to the present egoistic organization of our social and industrial system, the selfish and unscrupulous power of wealth directed and stimulated by superior intelligence and energy, on the one hand, and the brute forces of ignorance driven to despair by the disheartening and debasing pressure of poverty, on the other hand, arrayed against each other in fierce and bitter conflict. Much of the individual viciousness, which society is required to punish, springs directly from the unjust and injurious conditions of life, which society itself has created. It is the perception of this fact that disturbs the conscience, puzzles the will, and palsies the arm of the modern law-giver and executor of justice.