We must learn to appraise rightly the equipment of every child and, as far as possible, of every adult to the end that they may find an environment where they can live.  It must never be forgotten that man is nothing but heredity and environment and that the heredity cannot be changed but the environment may be.  In the past and present, the world has sought to adjust heredity to environment.  The problem of the future in dealing with crime will be to adjust environment to heredity.  To a large extent this can be done in a wholesale way.  Any improved social arrangement that will make it easier for the common man to live will necessarily save a large number from crime.  Perhaps if the social improvement should be great enough it would prevent the vast majority of criminal acts.  Life should be made easier for the great mass from which the criminal is ever coming.  As far as experience and logic can prove anything, it is certain that every improvement in environment will lessen crime.

Codes of law should be shortened and rendered simpler.  It should not be expected that criminal codes will cover all human and social life.  The old method of appealing to brute force and fear should gradually give place to teaching and persuading and fitting men for life.  All prisons should be in the hands of experts, physicians, criminologists, biologists, and, above all, the humane.  Every prisoner should be made to feel that the state is interested in his good as well as the good of the society from which he came.  Sentences should be indeterminate, but the indeterminate sentence of today is often a menace to freedom and a means of great cruelty and wrong.  The indeterminate sentence can only be of value in a well-equipped prison where each man is under competent observation as if he were ill in a hospital.  And this should be supplemented with an honest, intelligent parole commission, fully equipped for thorough work.  Until that time comes, the maximum penalty should be fixed by the jury, the parole board retaining the power to reduce the punishment or parole.  No two crimes are alike.  No two offenders are alike.  Those who have no friends on the outside are forgotten and neglected after the prison doors have been closed upon them.  Some men now are confined much too long; others not long enough.  No doubt, owing to the imperfections of man, this will always be the case.

At present no penal institutions have the equipment or management to provide against such shortcomings.  They never can have it while men believe punishment is vengeance.  When the public is ready to provide for the protection of society and still to recognize and heed the impulses of humanity and mercy, it will abolish all fixed terms.  As well might it send a patient to a hospital for a fixed time and then discharge him, regardless of whether he is cured or not, as to confine a convict for a definite predetermined time.  If the offense is one of a serious nature that endangers the public, the prisoner should not