Neither is it necessary that the bad luck shall be great at the first misfortune.  It may be but the loss of a few dollars which another could easily stand.  It may be only a few days of sickness which would be of no consequence to someone else.  It may be the death of a father or an uncle, while the same sort of tragedy might be the source of another’s wealth.  It may be some other person’s hard luck which takes him from school and leaves him to follow a life of hard and constant toil.  It may be that he had the bad luck not to marry the person of his choice, or it may be that he had the bad luck to marry her.  It may be because he had no children; it may be because he had too many.  It may well be that he has been saved from prison by dying early of tuberculosis.  He may have been saved from a railroad wreck by going to jail.  Infinite are the tricks of chance.  Infinite are the combinations and consequences that may come from turning the cards in a single deck.

Who is the perfect one that should be willing to punish vengefully his fellow-man?  Let one look honestly into his own life and pick out the important things that lead to fortune or disaster from birth onward, and say how many are the results of circumstances over which he had no control.

Where is the human being, in the presence of a dead child or a dead parent or a dead friend or in the presence of a terrible trouble, that has not sat down in sorrow and despair and again and again lived over every circumstance that led to the disaster, asking why he did not turn this way instead of that way?  Why did he not stop here, or go there; why did he do this or why did he not do that?  Why did he not take this short step?  Why did he not think of this or think of that?  If only any one of almost an infinite number of things had been done or left undone, the dead would be alive or the disaster would not have befallen.  Every man who is honest with himself knows that he has been a creature of conditions and chance, or at least what is chance as far as a man can see, and what was clearly chance to him.  He knows that if he has met success, he has only been more in luck than the rest.  If he has intelligence and human sympathy, he feels only pity for the suffering.  He would never punish in vengeance or hatred.  He knows that all do the best they can, with what they have.

Enumerating some of the many causes of crime ought to be an unnecessary task.  To give the number of ways men die or are killed by accident, means only that sooner or later they die, and if they had not died one way, they would have died another.  It means only that a machine will inevitably give way in some part, and man may go on finding the weak spots and strengthening them forever and still the end will come.  Fate does not look for a weak spot; it looks for the weakest and finds it.