population. This, in my judgment, is the most important branch of the subject, but the members of this association are doubtless more familiar with the directly bad influence of spoils politics upon the administration of our penal and reformatory institutions.
Even when spoils politics does not issue in definite and manifest corruption, it still has a terribly paralyzing influence upon all attempts to reform criminals. Wherever politics is a wholly selfish business, and "the art of winning elections" is practiced as a means of livelihood by men not qualified for the offices to which they attain, we have a blundering, obtuse and conscienceless management of institutions. A teacher who was looking up local conditions as a preparation for lecturing on crime found that the only man connected with the county jail who had an unselfish interest in prison reform was one of the prisoners. The sheriff of the county said he was in oflfice to make all he could out of it "honestly," which meant "legally." He was a great improvement on his predecessor who was believed to have given his cupidity an even freer rein. In such an institution, and it is typical of two-thirds of our county institutions, the criminal must come to feel that the state is as selfish as himself, though it may not be as criminal. I have referred to a county institution in California. Let me refer in the same connection to the State Penitentiary of Nebraska, where the wardenship has been the football of politics, where prisoners are pretty well proved to have been killed while being corrected, and where the lobbyist lessee, who for more than ten years held the institution as in the hollow of his hand, has been finally sent to the penitentiary himself. Again and again improved methods of dealing with crime, modern reformatories, the parole of prisoners, police supervision of discharged prisoners, the indeterminate sentence, and numberless other improvements work unsatisfactorily because we have not officials honest enough, intelligent enough and diligent enough to carry them out properly.
There is yet a third aspect of this subject which must be mentioned, although it is not perhaps the special business of this
