malaria. It is the greed for gold, the love of luxury in the American people, which have caused the legislative frauds, the municipal corruptions, the violations of trust which excite alarm in our land. It is the admiration of wealth, no matter how gained, which incites and emboldens the desperate speculator in commercial centres to sport with the sacred interests of labor, to unsettle the business of honest industry, by playing tricks with the standards of value. Those who use the stocks of great corporations as machines for gambling schemes are more deliberately and artfully dishonest than the more humble swindler who throws his loaded dice. Many of the transactions of our capitalists are more hurtful to the welfare of our people than the acts of thieves and robbers. In the better days of American simplicity, honesty, and patriotism, these things could not have been done. No one would then dare to face a people indignant at such rapacious greed. Such influences have led to frauds, defalcations, breaches of trust. They have filled our prisons and overwhelmed many households with shame and sorrow. Yet the authors of such things are honored for their wealth, and we ask with eagerness how rich do they get, and not how do they get riches. To make the public feel that criminals are men of like passions with ourselves, and that crime is an infectious as well as a malignant disease, that its sources are not so much personal inclination as general demoralization, are the great first steps toward reform. When we feel the disease may enter our own houses and seize upon the mental and moral weakness of those we love, we are ready to study its causes and its workings. We shall then uphold and honor those men of humanity and true statesmanship who study out the cause of moral stains as we honor and support those men of science who search out in sick-rooms and hospitals the cause, and cure the complaint, which kills the body. He who masters the diagnosis of crime gains a key to the mysteries of our nature and to the secret sources of demoralization which opens to him a knowledge of the great principles of public and private reform—the true methods of a good administration of the laws. Pauperism and crime have been the subjects of earnest thought by the best and wisest men of the world, not only on account of their direct interest, but also on account of their relationship to all other matters of good government. Neither of them can be driven out of existence. They will always be problems to vex statesmanship, but they must always be battled with. In the social edifice they are like fires ever kindling in its different parts, which are to be kept under by watchfulness and care. If neglected, they burst out into the flames of anarchy and revolution, and sweep away forms of government. These subjects must be studied directly, and in their moral aspects. There is a pervading idea in our country, that the spread of knowledge will check crime. No one values learning more than I do; but it is no specific for immorality and vice. Without moral and religious training, it frequently becomes an aid to crime. Science, mechanical skill, a knowledge of business--
