I am perfectly satisfied that there are millions of people incapable of committing certain crimes, and it may be true that there are millions of others incapable of practicing certain virtues. We do not blame a man because he is not a sculptor, a poet, a painter, or a statesman. We say he has not the genius. Are we certain that it does not require genius to be good? Where is the man with intelligence enough to take into consideration the circumstances of each individual case? Who has the mental balance with which to weigh the forces of heredity, of want, of temptation,--and who can analyze with certainty the mysterious motions of the brain? Where and what are the sources of vice and virtue? In what obscure and shadowy recesses of the brain are passions born? And what is it that for the moment destroys the sense of right and wrong? Who knows to what extent reason becomes the prisoner of passion--of some strange and wild desire, the seeds of which were sown, it may be, thousands of years ago in the breast of some savage? To what extent do antecedents and surroundings affect the moral sense? Is it not possible that the tyranny of governments, the injustice of nations, the fierceness of what is called the law, produce in the individual a tendency in the same direction? Is it not true that the citizen is apt to imitate his nation? Society degrades its enemies--the individual seeks to degrade his. Society plunders its enemies, and now and then the citizen has the desire to plunder his. Society kills its enemies, and possibly sows in the heart of some citizen the seeds of murder. III. Is it not true that the criminal is a natural product, and that society unconsciously produces these children of vice? Can we not safely take another step, and say that the criminal is a victim, as the diseased and insane and deformed are victims? We do not think of punishing a man because he is afflicted with disease--our desire is to find a cure. We send him, not to the penitentiary, but to the hospital, to an asylum. We do this because we recognize the fact that disease is naturally produced--that it is inherited from parents, or the result of unconscious negligence, or it may be of recklessness--but instead of punishing, we pity. If there are diseases of the mind, of the brain, as there are diseases of the body; and if these diseases of the mind, these deformities of the brain, produce, and necessarily produce, what we call vice, why should we punish the-criminal, and pity those who are physically diseased? Socrates, in some respects at least one of the wisest of men, said: "It is strange that you should not be angry when you meet a man with an ill-conditioned body, and yet be vexed when you encounter one with an ill-conditioned soul." We know that there are deformed bodies, and we are equally certain that there are deformed minds.