Justice requires that each individual shall receive from society a reward proportionate to his contribution to society. Can the state, acting through officials, make this apportionment better than it can be made by competition? At present official favors are not distributed strictly according to merit, either in republics or in monarchies; it is certain that socialism would insure a fairer division of rewards? If the government operates all the factories, all the farms, and all the stores, there must be superintendents as well as workmen; there must be different kinds of employment, some more pleasant, some less pleasant. Is it likely that any set of men can distribute the work or fix the compensation to the satisfaction of all?

At present private monopoly is putting upon individualism an undeserved odium, and it behooves the individualist to address himself energetically to this problem in order that the advantages of competition may be restored to industry. And the duty of immediate action is made more imperative by the fact that the socialist is inclined to support the monopoly, in the belief that it will be easier to induce the government to take over an industry after it has passed into the hands of a few men.

I have been asked if I think socialism is the cure for these evils. As we do not know what state socialism would bring about, we cannot say. But I am sure that certain socialistic measures are necessary. We need municipal tenements, as they have in Liverpool, Birmingham, and London, where the children will have healthful surroundings, plenty of places to play, and there are no landlords to exact profits.

Other places have nationalized the coal fields, and the poor get coal at cost. At Rochester, in England, the death-rate has been cut down one-half by the municipalization of the milk-supply, and the children of the poor, instead of the pale-blue poison they used to have, get a fine, healthful food. These are socialistic measures, and every advance we make is toward socialism.

The number of homicides that are punished by lynching exceeds the number punished by due process of law. There is nothing more nonsensical or ridiculous than the goody-goody talk about lynching. Much may be said in favor of Goldwin Smith's quotation, "that there are communities in which lynch-law is better than any other."

Germs of maudlin sentimentality are widespread. On every hand we hear slimy, mushy, gushy expressions of sympathy, the criminal called "plucky," "nervy," "fighting against fearful odds for his life."

It is said that society has no right to put murderers to death. In my opinion, society must fall back on the law of self-preservation. It should cut through and make war, in my opinion, for its life. Life imprisonment is not possible, because there is no life imprisonment.

In the next year nine thousand people will be murdered. As I stand here to-day I tell you that nine thousand are doomed to death with all the cruelty of the criminal heart, and with no regard for home and families, and two-thirds of those murders will be due to the maudlin sentiment sometimes called mercy.

I have no sympathy for the criminal. My sympathy is for those who will be murdered, for their families and for their children.

This sham humanitarianism has become a stench. The cry now is for righteousness. The past generation has abolished human slavery. It is for the present to deal with the problems of the future and among them this problem of crime. Young men, like Jerome, like Folk and Hughes, resolve never to be servants of criminals, but to do your best to punish crime as it should be punished.

We are the victims of the world's literature, of its prevailing creed, and the popular judgment. The greatest master in the world's literature, seeking a type that on account of peculiar conditions and circumstances could stand for cruel hatred and implacable revenge, deliberately changed the contents of a story and made Shylock the Jew the embodiment of inhuman revenge.

The poet must have felt that if ever in a human soul there could arise such unyielding hate as he desired to portray it might, in a sense, be justified in one whose heart rankled with the memories of ages of persecution and unjust hatred to which his race had been subjected.

Here was one, the poet seemed to say, who could well execute the villainies he had been taught. He therefore produced a character dramatically consistent, but at the same time he did an everlasting injury to the Jew, because he produced a character altogether historically untrue. The Jew is anything but vindictive; he forgets injuries readily; that is why he is so optimistic; he has a horror of shedding blood, and whatever vices the Jew may be capable of, the one of ferocious cruelty cannot be saddled upon him.

Nevertheless, the word Shylock has become in English speech synonymous with everything that is bad. This injustice in literature will persist until some great genius possessing the broad-mindedness of a Lessing and the dramatic power of a Shakespeare shall arise among English-speaking people and create an English Nathan the Wise.

The Western world's creed centers in an event which, strictly speaking, belongs to the same category as that of the killing of Socrates, the burning of Giordano Bruno, and of Servetus. Thus, classic Greek, Catholic, and Protestant were all equally guilty of sacrificing the best of their time. The progress of mankind has, sad to say, often been purchased by the martyrdom of some of the noblest men that walked on earth.

Yet it is the Jewish people that have been singled out to be held up to the world as Deicides, and every child at the time when the soul is most receptive is inoculated with an antipathy against every living Jew because of an event that took place nineteen hundred years