states compare very favorably with those who still reside in the sections of the country which these pioneers left behind.  It cannot be shown that the less intelligent have criminal natures.  All that can be shown is that they have a poorer equipment to meet the stress and strain of life.  To make most of this class safe, all that is needed is fairer conditions and an easier environment.  If society could only recover from the obsession that what is necessary to regulate man is plenty of prisons and harder punishments, it would be fairly easy and infinitely cheaper to improve the environment from which crime springs than to visit vengeance on the victim.

The effect of education is very great.  Many a subnormal and backward person has been educated so he could take a place in life that those with a much greater natural ability could not fill.

Beyond the segregation of the imbecile, the insane and those who have committed crime, it is dangerous to go.  The course of preventing crime lies in the other direction, better opportunity and an easier life.

It has grown to be a commonplace in the discussion of crime to speak of isolation and sterilization as the proper treatment of the criminal and defective.  This is generally done without any clear understanding of the laws of heredity.

The laws of the transmission from parent to child of traits and tendencies are not yet well enough known to justify any attempt to interfere with the function of life, except in the case of the idiotic.  It is plain that crime cannot be inherited.  Certain defects in the brain and nervous system can be and are inherited.  No brain or nervous system is perfect, so the problem is one of the incapacity which causes the maladjustment.  Crime results from defective heredity when applied to the environment.  It comes from the inability of the machine to make the necessary adjustments of life.  The making of the criminal is largely a question of his fortune or misfortune in the environment where he is placed.  It is absurd to say that one inherits the tendency to rob or rape or burglarize or kill.  He may inherit an unstable organization that in certain hostile environments will lead him to any of these crimes.  For that matter all men inherit the organization that will bring these results if the environment is sufficiently hard.  Society may in many ways place too high a value on human life.  Still we punish men who place too low a value on the lives of others, and the state should be very slow to destroy life or the capacity for life.

There is much to learn, much to explain about the mysterious workings of heredity, before man can undertake to say that he has the wisdom or justice to choose the ones who should be the bearers of life to the future.

It is most common to find in the same family various degrees of intelligence.  Now and then a man of such high powers and faculties is born that he is regarded by scientists as a “sport” who defies all known laws in his origin.  Often one person in a family is of commanding strength, while the rest are commonplace.