How easily the legislature may evade its duty in the premises without the dissent of the court is proved by the facts which gave rise to the case of Powell v. Pennsylvania.

Thirdly. That the police power thus exercised is extensive and undefined (and dangerous in proportion to its want of definiteness), but may be generally said to consist in the right of the legislature to adopt such precautions and impose such penalties as they, not the courts, may think fit for the protection of the people of the State against whatsoever in their judgment may threaten injury. This is a very indefinite definition, but it is the best I can make.

I do not believe there is anything more important to the liberty of coming generations than to set limits and bounds to the police power, but the work has not yet been begun. Especially is this so if the rule adopted in Powell v. Pennsylvania, that the courts have no right to penetrate the disguises under which this dangerous power may cloak itself, be adhered to, which is practically almost if not quite equivalent to saying that legislatures have in this respect omnipotent power to overrule Bills of Right and Constitutional guarantees and limitations.

Fourthly. That all property and avocations in which the "public" have an interest are so devoted to the service of this "public" that they may be controlled by the legislative power, without the necessity of resort to the power of eminent domain, or compensation to those who thereby suffer loss. As Mugler was compelled to pocket the loss of his brewery, and Powell to close his oleomargarine works, and Munn to shut up his elevator or run it at a loss, so in future the only alternative offered to those who, having appropriated their property or labor in services which may be beneficial to others, may be ordered by legislative authority to work at a loss, is to shut up shop and to betake themselves to something so exclusively private that nobody but they themselves can receive benefit. This is the reward which the law threatens to future "public" servants of this class.

Fifthly. That, as the extent of the police power is indefinite, so also are the facts and circumstances which shall constitute such practical dedication of property or services to others indefinite. At present, they are expressed under an "et cetera"; and it is reserved for the future judiciary to explain this symbol and give its full and accurate meaning.

Lastly. Those who believe with me that our fathers rightly

classified the right of property with the rights of life and liberty, as among the most important; those who are persuaded that every possible encouragement should be given to individual effort by fully protecting the sanctity of individual property; those who are confident that it will be better and cheaper in the end to pay something, by way of eminent domain, even for suppressing breweries and distilleries and oleomargarine factories and elevators, than to destroy them under the pretence of the exercise of an indefinite police power, or of an inherent right of government to control property devoted to a so-called "public" use,― will find reason to consider whether the Bills of Rights do not need rewriting, and whether it ought not to be made more imperative upon courts to open their eyes to the violation of such rights, and to stretch forth their executive power to enforce them.

Our fathers established a republic on the theory that the greatest possible happiness results from the largest liberty of individual effort. To this end they relied, not upon the direction, or even encouragement, of labor by the State, but upon the inducements of liberty and the protection, through the agency of Constitutional guarantees, of life, liberty, and the fruits of labor. It was, at an early date, and it has often since been, sought to substitute a species of indirect State socialism for this freedom upon which Mr. Jefferson and his associates relied. We are now, however, confronted not only by indirect but also direct State socialism, protection from which will finally depend upon the individual intelligence and personal aspirations of citizens. In the struggle before us, however, the Constitutional guarantees ought to be a bulwark and strong fortress of defence for those who believe in labor, directed by the guiding mind of the laborer, and not by the State; and such they will prove to be unless their meanings be perverted and their purpose thwarted by those who are charged with the duty of expounding and sustaining them.

3. EDUCATION AS A CURE FOR CRIME.

BY S. T. DUTTON,

SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS, NEW HAVEN, CONN.

(Read Sept. 5, 1889.)

The relation of education to crime (and I shall use the word "crime" as including all that is opposed to good morals as well as what is contrary to laws) has usually been considered on far too narrow lines. The attempt has been made over and over again to prove that ordinary school instruction is a direct specific for crime; that the illiterate are largely criminals, while the intelligent are law-abiding and virtuous. It has not been difficult, of course, to overthrow these arguments; for the same statistics upon which they were based, by a different manipulation, have been made to do duty in destroying them. More than this, in much of the discussion of this sort there is wanting any adequate recognition of the real essence of crime or the almost purely intellectual character of education as it has been carried on in the past.

It has been forgotten that criminal aptitudes, like tendencies to disease or insanity, are largely physiological, and have tainted the blood and reacted upon the nerves of a long ancestry. Another universal principle has been overlooked; namely, that any organization tends to build itself up from the germ after an ancestral pattern, and that the modifiability of that type is brought about only under special nurture and environment applied at an early stage of growth. "Heredity," says Ribot, "is a law of living Nature, a biological law of necessity, a principle of conservatism and stability." Hence it follows that the cruelty, baseness, and crime of past ages are reflected, not only in history, but in the wrong-doing of the present time. Evil instincts, passions, aptitudes, are woven into the fibre of the nerve substance. They taint the blood and are stamped upon the countenance. Whole families are so degraded that mental and moral recovery seems impossible. The Whitechapel districts of our great cities contain a population that is more homogeneous than the Back Bays or Fifth Avenues. The turbid stream of poverty and ignorance, of intemperance and

immorality, has persistently coursed its way down through the generations of the past, and to-day often threatens to overflow and carry ruin to the existing order of things.

Seeing, then, that tendencies to crime are part of the legacy to human nature from a remote past, and are hence constitutional, it is not difficult to understand why education has failed as a quick and complete remedy for them. If we consider, also, the large catalogue of crimes caused immediately by intemperance, we find that education has not been of a sort to prevent them.

The educational methods of the past have been almost exclusively directed to the culture of the intellect. This has been true of elementary teaching both in this country and in Europe; it has, to a large extent, also, been true of the colleges. To memorize, to recite, to reason and demonstrate, have been the chief aims, Prior to the last few years, little attention was given to bodily or mental health. The school was often as unsanitary as the poorest home. No attempt was made to bring the nervous organism of the child into harmony with his environment, and, hence, to promote cheerfulness, spontaneity, and vigor. It was usually a system of mental tasks rigidly applied, whose direct tendency was often to make the sick more sick, the morbid more morbid, and the vicious more vicious. The doctrine of the "survival of the fittest" had free course. Those only who had inherited physical and intellectual vigor endured the strain and rose to success in life. There was nothing in the system that dealt heroically with human disease and evil in its germinal forms, or that recognized the great laws of natural selection and environment that operate in the breeding and rearing of children, as well as in the culture of plants and animals. Many a parent has looked with pride upon his well-bred horse, kept in a box-stall, paying strict attention to his food, exercise, supply of light and air, while his child, delicate, it may be, has been sent to a school where every principle of hygiene, moral and physical, was violated.

Again, assuming that education has been able largely to overcome ignorance, it has not therefore been a cure for crime. Says Herbert Spencer, "Ignorance and crime are not cause and effect: they are coincident results of the same cause. The fact is that scarcely any connection exists between morality and the discipline of ordinary teaching. Mere culture of the intellect (for education as usually conducted amounts to little more) is hardly at all operative upon conduct. Creeds pasted upon the memory, good prin

ciples learned by rote, lessons in right and wrong, will not eradicate vicious propensities, though people, in spite of their experience as parents and citizens, persist in hoping they will.”

Bernard Perez, whose exhaustive study of the "First Three Years of Childhood" entitles his views to respect, goes even farther than this. He says: "The business of education is much more concerned with the habits that children acquire, and with their wills, which are also developed by habitual practice, than with the development of their moral conscience. The latter is the blossom which will be followed by fruit; but the former are the roots and branches." It is, then, with the roots of life and character and the soil in which they grow that we are chiefly concerned in estimating the value of education upon those morally defective.

Before closing this discussion, I shall attempt to show that education bids fair to be so changed in the immediate future as to become more efficient as a corrective of evil tendencies. At present, I desire to speak of educational methods and results in the past, as affecting crime. While it must be apparent that education has not usually addressed itself to the will and the emotions, and has been blind to the truth that morals as well as mind depend upon health and body, it can still be shown that schools have done more than all other agencies during the past two centuries to improve the conditions under which civilized man lives. While they have not proved a prompt remedy for crime, they have promoted a general intelligence that has been able to deal with it more humanly and wisely.

Two great forces, inductive thought and the democratic spirit, have been at once the cause and effect of education. By the first, the human mind, freed from its fetters, has penetrated the secrets of nature, has conquered time and space, and has achieved in one hundred years greater social and industrial progress than were seen in any ten centuries of the world's former history.

The spirit of democracy has been no less potent in recasting human society and calling forth the energies of men in great enterprises tending to comfort, convenience, and health. On the American continent especially, the possibility of successful selfgovernment has been proven beyond all question. The same doctrine is working its way in Europe, and will gradually tend to curb the most autocratic of rulers and soften the restraints which harass the subject and thwart his enterprises.

Schools of learning, from the lowest to the highest, have been