If then our convict, upon his release, cannot keep himself in any honest employment, and cannot avoid arrest even when he is doing nothing at all, good or bad, it seems plain that he must either hunt out a quiet place where he may starve to death before the officer can arrest him for starving, or commit suicide in some more sudden and active manner, or he must accept the opportunity which is always at hand in "revert to a career of crime," as the saying is. Ex-convicts are often still human enough to be averse from starvation, and even from easier forms of self-destruction; and they yield to the temptation to steal. Like the idiots they are, they may hope to make a big strike and get away with it, and in some remote or foreign place, under another name, live out an unobserved and blameless existence. Thereupon there is rejoicing in the ranks of the secret service; armed with their bertillons, they swoop upon their quarry and bear him away. "May it please the Court, this man is an incorrigible; not deterred by previous punishment, immediately upon release he plunges again into crime; he should receive the limit!" The Court thinks so too; the limit is imposed, and the malefactor is led out to the living death which will end with death in reality. And now will some righteous and competent person arise and proclaim that this man's yielding to his first temptation to crime did NOT involve greater moral turpitude than did his yielding to the second temptation or to the third--greater or at least as great--and that therefore the severer sentence is justified? His first misdeed was prompted by hunger, ignorance, drunkenness, or cupidity; the others were the fruit of desperation itself--and how many of you have known what desperation means?