sponsibility, you are adrift upon a sea of intellectual doubt, with neither chart nor safe anchorage.

How, then, shall we reconcile the fact that we are to hold a man responsible for his act, and yet not responsible for the motives which led him to commit it? It sounds at first like a contradiction; but the explanation is not far to seek. It can best be understood by an illustration:

When Nature decrees that a baby shall burn his fingers whenever, attracted by the play of light upon it, he touches the hot teapot, we realize the wise provision of Nature which educates every child alike, making no discrimination and no distinction of time or place. If the child continues his foolish experiment, he continues to be punished; until he learns his lesson; until, through experience, "the burnt child dreads the fire."

But when the baby has his finger burned by the hot teapot do we hate him for his ignorance or folly? Do we consider him a member of an alien "class" and proceed to wreak our vengeance upon him; or a victim of a strange disease for which we should call a doctor? Not at all. We regard his proceeding as the expression of a perfectly natural spirit of adventure or of an equally natural elementary selfishness. We fondle the little chubby fingers held out to us so beseechingly, we kiss the tears away and give wise and tender counsel for the future. The baby is held responsible by Nature for his act and punished for it sternly; but we do not hold him ethically responsible for his carelessness or unwisdom. The effort we make is to prevent a repetition of his mistake; to train the child to understand and utilize the great natural forces of fire and heat, and not to misuse them or continue burning his fingers for the rest of his natural life.

The act of the baby who burns his fingers on the teapot and that of the men who commit some serious crime against society spring fundamentally from the same cause. Both come about through ignorance of the working of great natural

or social forces. The man appears to be guided by an intent to destroy the work or lives of other men, which is plainly absent from the child; but that is a difference which is superficial and is one of degree and not of kind. Both desire something and endeavor to get it, without regard to consequences, moral or material.

A man's actions are the resultant of many forces. His heredity, his environment, his training, all react upon that mysterious something-the man's own individuality. What is it that makes John so different from his brother James; that makes Peter the very antithesis of Paul? No one knows. No one is ever likely to know. For lay whatever stress we please upon all the recognizable influences which form a man's character, we are still far from accounting for the human being who stands before us; we cannot explain what makes me, me and you, you.

If the influences which really form a man's character are hard to determine, it is still harder to find adequate reasons to blame him for the conduct which results. He is certainly not responsible for his heredity-many children would select other families to be born into, if they had the choice; he is certainly not to blame for an unfortunate environment-the slums are surely an acquired taste; his training is largely dominated by his parents' resources, for which he is certainly not responsible-whether he goes to school and college, or is early turned adrift into the streets, being largely a matter of the paternal pocket-book.

"Judge not that ye be not judged," is the Biblical injunction. It is not only good ethics, it is sound penology. We must hold a man closely responsible for his crime, for that is the best way to prevent a repetition and it also gives a chance to educate him into a better outlook upon life; but at the same time we must recognize that he may not be at all responsible for the ignorance or weakness that led him to commit the crime.

The conception of the criminal as the unfortunate victim of a "disease of crim

inality" should be utterly discarded; it has no sound foundation. On the other hand society, having determined just how and to what extent all offences against its standard of conduct should be punished, must learn to execute its decrees as inexorably as God, through the laws of nature, inflicts His punishments. But just as the affectionate mother, although she cannot prevent nature's punishment, gives love and sympathy to her baby who has burned his finger; so the state on its parental side should deal tenderly and sympathetically with its erring children.

Ignorance is the curse of God, Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to Heaven.

The foregoing view, as to the nonexistence of "the criminal" according to the old penology, is no mere theory which you are asked to accept as a working hypothesis; it is not a matter of cold statistics gathered from cardboard records of institutional inmates; it is a carefully drawn conclusion from patient first-hand study of the living men. A sympathetic study, it is true, but one genuinely scientific in its desire to find the truth.

May I again urge the fact that I do not for a moment lose sight of the wickedness and folly of which these prisoners have been guilty. With the exception of a very few innocent men, they fully deserve the exile from society to which they have been condemned. What I wish to emphasize is the existence of the criminal's essential humanity. The blasphemous theory of the irreclaimable criminal, foreordained to a life of wickedness and social perversion, will break down completely whenever it is honestly tested. Let me close with an additional illustration of this point, taken from the life of the Honor Camp:

Two of my camp-mates-big, powerful, rough fellows; one of them bred in the slums of the great city, the other the product of a prominent juvenile institution and several prisons were assigned

to work on a stretch of the highway where every morning there passed on their way to school a timid little girl of eleven or twelve years of age and a sullen-looking boy of two or three years older. The smiling faces and cheery greetings of the two gray-clothed convicts soon thawed the reserve of the children, and a pleasant acquaintance arose; for the golden curls and sweet face of the little girl seemed to bring the very warmth and light of the sun to the hearts of the men so long separated from their families and forbidden even the sight of women and children.

Soon the boy and girl were pouring their troubles into the ears of their sympathetic friends; and there was real trouble to tell. They had been placed in the care of a neighboring farmer by their father, whose second marriage had given. them an indifferent, if not unkind, stepmother with a child of her own. The farmer was not only overworking and illtreating the boy; but he was half starving both children; and day after day the two convicted criminals would quietly lay aside from their own scanty breakfast enough to make two sandwiches to slip into the lunch-box of the children.

On the day I returned to camp for my second stay, I was taken aside by one of the convicts, who told me the story of these children; told me that the boy, after seriously debating with himself the question of suicide had decided to run away and go West. "You must do something for those children," said my friend, the prisoner, to me; "you must save them."

"Yes, Jack," I answered; "I shall be glad to do what I can": and then I started to talk of his own affairs and the chances of a pardon or commutation for himself.

But Jack was not to be diverted from his subject. "Don't you bother about my pardon now," he said. Then he went on to tell how the boy had begun his plans of running away by stealing from the farmer a small sum of money. "And Tom," Jack continued, with the tears running down his cheeks, "you know

what that means. It means that he's following right along in our tracks, straight into state prison. For God's sake do something to save them."

As soon as practicable I got into communication with the father and sent him out to see for himself. He was shocked at what he found and removed the children to his own home at once. Later he sent them to relatives in Pennsylvania, where they are now living, happy and contented, going regularly to school and writing now and again to their friends in Auburn prison.

Yet there are those who still urge that it is useless to deal kindly with men in prison; that appeal to their manhood is wasted; that the old system of severity and stupidity and brutality is all that Society owes to the criminal.

I will not raise the question of what Society owes to the criminal; the important thing is what Society owes to itself. Let us admit that the first and by far the

greatest consideration is the safety of Society; then what follows? Shall we r let the vicious become more vicious? the wicked increase their wickedness? the de- p stroyer go on destroying?

These are matters which must be ret served for another lecture. What should now be made clear is that in the use of the word "criminal" we must confine ourselves to the actual meaning of the word; we must think of a criminal simply as a human being who has committed t crime, not as a wild beast to be trapped and caged and broken. Let us think of the denizens of our prisons as men; weak or strong, stolid or flighty, vicious or well-intentioned-but always men; moved by the same kind of instincts as ourselves; outraged by brutal treatment, softened by kindly treatment, precisely as we our selves should be; possessors, each and every one, of the spark of divine fire, which sympathy and fair treatment may be able to fan into a steady, purifying flame.

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GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS:

I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious -very serious-choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making.

On the 3d of February last I officially

From Why We Are at War by Woodrow Wilson. Published by Harper Brothers. Reprinted by permission.

and

laid before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government that on and after the first day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every ves sel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe, or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean.

That had seemed to be the object of

the German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since April of last year the Imperial German Government had somewhat restrained the commanders of its undersea craft in conformity with its promise then given to us that passenger boats should not be sunk and that due warning would be given to all other vessels which its submarines might seek to destroy, when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that their crews were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in their open boats.

The precautions taken were meager and haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain degree of restraint was observed.

The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of belligerents.

Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were provided with safe conduct through the prescribed areas by the German Government itself and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.

International law had its origin in the attempt to set up some law, which would be respected and observed upon the seas, where no nation had right of dominion and where lay the free highways of the world.

By painful stage after stage has that law been built up, with meager enough results, indeed, after all was accomplished that could be accomplished, but always with a clear view, at least, of what the heart and conscience of mankind demanded.

This minimum of right the German

Government has swept aside under the plea of retaliation and necessity, and because it had no weapons which it could use at sea except these, which it is impossible to employ, as it is employing them, without throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or of respect for the understandings that were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the world.

I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants-men, women, and children-engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be.

The present German warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of; but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way.

There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion.

When I addressed the Congress on the 26th of February last I thought that it would suffice to assert our neutral rights with arms, our right to use the seas against unlawful interference, our right to keep our people safe against unlawful violence.

But armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable. Because submarines are in effect outlaws when used as the Ger

man submarines have been used against merchant shipping, it is impossible to defend ships against their attacks, as the law of nations has assumed that merchantmen would defend themselves against privateers or cruisers, visible craft, giving chase upon the open sea.

It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim necessity indeed, to destroy them before they have shown their own intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all.

The German Government denies the right of neutrals to use arms at all within the areas of the sea which it has prohibited, even in the defense of rights which no modern publicist has ever before questioned their right to defend.

The intimation is conveyed that the armed guards which we have placed on our merchant ships will be treated as beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best. In such circumstances and in the face of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual. It is likely only to produce what it was meant to prevent. It is practically certain to draw us into the war without either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents.

There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: We will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are not common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life.

With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it; and that it take immediate steps not only to

put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.

What this will involve is clear. It will involve the utmost practicable operation in counsel and action with the Governments now at war with Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension to those Governments of the most liberal financial credits, in order that our resources may, so far as possible, be added to theirs. It will involve the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of the country to supply the materials of war and serve the incidental needs of the nation in the most abundant, and yet the most economical and efficient, way possible.

It will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy in all respects, but particularly in supplying it with the best means of dealing with the enemy's submarines. It will involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of the United States, already provided for by law in case of war, of at least 500,000 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service, and also the authorization of subsequent additional increments of equal force so soon as they may be needed and can be handled in training.

It will involve also, of course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the present generation, by well-conceived taxation. I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation because it seems to me that it would be most unwise to base the credits which will now be necessary entirely on money borrowed. It is our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect our people so far as we may against the very serious hardships and evils which would be likely to arise out of the inflation which would be produced by vast loans.

In carrying out the measures by which these things are to be accomplished we