We are Pharisees, all, and sit in judgment on our fellowman, because we do not yet realize the mixture of evil and good that is in every man--none are exempt--only some are caught and punished. Men have come to us, desperate, despairing men, crying: "For God's sake, what are we to do? If we get a job someone will tell our employers we have 'done time,' and we are fired. If they find us on the street, we're arrested. Where can we go and what can we do?" A man may commit murder and not be a criminal, and yet a sneakthief is always a criminal and every burglar a potential murderer. Social conditions produce criminals. As well expect a rose to bloom in a swamp as human nature to flower in the slums. All our prisons are hotbeds of tuberculosis and most prison physicians hold their positions through political pull. In our opinion a greater distinction should be made between the penitentiary and house of correction. Petty misdemeanants should not be branded with the prison stigma. We also favor suspended sentence for first offenders. The crime and its punishment should be separated. At present the personal equation does not enter into the case when a judge imposes sentence. The man's environment, what leads him to break the law, and how best to help this particular man, all are questions that should be carefully considered before sentence is pronounced. INTELLIGENCE IN PUNISHING CRIME. A student of prison affairs once said that the prison population consists of two classes--people who never ought to have been sent to prison and people who never ought to be allowed to leave it. It is unfortunate that students interested in either one of these classes are too often apt to forget the importance of the other. There are many habitual criminals, weak persons readily giving way to temptation, who should not be classified as professionals. The professionals are only those who deliberately set about supporting themselves by crime. These are the ones who are among all criminals most unlikely to change their ways, and it was for their control that Detective Wooldridge suggested some years ago that after several convictions such criminals should be given a special trial to decide whether they were true professionals or not, and if they were, they should be imprisoned for life. If more attention were given to professional crime and if harsher methods were used in protecting society from it, the result would be merciful in the end--merciful both to the citizens protected from such crime and to the men who, as conditions now are, graduate every year into such careers. THE "SILENT SYSTEM" IS A CRIME AGAINST CRIMINALS. The penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, in 1907, was the only prison in America conducted on what is known as the "silent system."