labor produced than those of any other part of Europe. The King not only set a good example in making the most out of everything, but he personally caned lessons of industry and frugality into his people, high and low.

There were occasionally black sheep in even such a sternly regulated family, but as a general rule the sons and daughters married strong, clean mates, {49} and strictly maintained the family traditions. A provision against the way ward princelings was made by which their possessions passed into the main house if they fell below the standard. So the Hohenzollerns grew, and Prussia grew from a despised sandbarren to be one of the Six Great Powers of Europe, and is now the head of the mighty German Empire. We do not have as full history of the House of Savoy, but we have enough to know that in much the same way, at the same time, and by much the same moral discipline, it arose from the lordship of a little stretch of mountain {50} land in the Alps to rule over United Italy.

THE most attractive feature of this self-pruning of the objectionable growths in society, as said before, is that the victims destroy themselves under the hallucination that they are drinking the richest wine of earthly pleasure. When execution can be made a matter of keen relish to the condemned, certainly nothing is wanting on the score of humanity.

{51} I ANTICIPATE the objection that slaying bad men by means of their own vicious propensities brings much misery to those connected with them.

But then all innocent persons connected with bad men are fated to suffer in exact proportion to the closeness of the connection, whether the bad men are destroyed or not. Weak, selfish, perverted, and criminal men always inflict misery upon their relatives and associates. This is not usually intensified by their being drunkards or debauchees.

It is also true that no one of Nature's methods of extinction is pleasant {52} to those connected with the victim. The thief or thug, prematurely dying with delirium tremens, is certainly quite as bearable a sight to those before whose eyes it may come as the spectacle of a virtuous man, the sole support of his family, slowly wasting away with consumption in spite of all that loving service and agonizing sympathy can do to retain for him a life that is of so much value.

TO the next objection that the practice of vice is not invariably suicidal, since many rascals live to attain as {53} green an old age as the most righteous, it is sufficient to say that plentiful as these exceptions may occasionally seem, their proportion to the whole number is at least as small as that of the exceptions to any other general law of biology.

The policeman on the next corner will bear decided testimony that the number of scoundrels who survive their 30th year is astonishingly small, and he can point out any number of erstwhile troublesome members of the community who are ending their lives in penitentiary, poorhouse, or hospital at an age when well-behaved men are {54} just entering upon the serious business of life.

It is also demonstrable that the proportion of vicious men to the whole population is much less to-day than at any previous period in the history of the race. This shows conclusively the improvement of society by the self-destructiveness of vice. The proportion of bad men is rapidly diminishing, because bad men die sooner and propagate fewer than good ones.