I confess I am one of
those who hold that society is largely responsible even for crime and
pauperism, and especially other less clearly defined conditions in the
community by which there exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the
structure of society itself. The process of freeing man from the fetters
of the past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still early in
its manifestation; social justice is the cry under which this progress
is made, and, being grounded in material conditions and hot with men's
passions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomes
revolutionary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to society
as in the ways without number that it has opened for the doing of
justice to men in masses, for the moulding of safe and orderly methods
of change, and for the formation as a part of human character of a habit
of philanthropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be partly laid
to the door of society itself? Charity, great as it is, can but
alleviate, it cannot upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant ills;
nor can mercy, however humanely and wisely exerted, do more than
mollify the misfortune that abides in the criminal.
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