from birth onward, and
say how many are the results of circumstances over which he had no
control.

Where is the human being, in the presence of a dead child or a dead
parent or a dead friend or in the presence of a terrible trouble, that
has not sat down in sorrow and despair and again and again lived over
every circumstance that led to the disaster, asking why he did not turn
this way instead of that way? Why did he not stop here, or go there; why
did he do this or why did he not do that? Why did he not take this short
step? Why did he not think of this or think of that? If only any one of
almost an infinite number of things had been done or left undone, the
dead would be alive or the disaster would not have befallen. Every man
who is honest with himself knows that he has been a creature of
conditions and chance, or at least what is chance as far as a man can
see, and what was clearly chance to him. He knows that if he has met
success, he has only been more in luck than the rest. If he has
intelligence and human sympathy, he feels only pity for the suffering.
He would never punish in vengeance or hatred. He knows that all do the
best they can, with what they have.

Enumerating some of the many causes of crime ought to be an unnecessary
task. To give the number of ways men die or are killed by accident,
means only that sooner or later they die, and if they had not died one
way, they would have died another. It means only that a machine will
inevitably give way in some part, and man may go on finding the weak
spots and strengthening them forever and still the end will come. Fate
does not look for a weak spot; it looks for the weakest and finds it.

Manifold causes produce crime; some men commit it from one cause: some
from another. Statistics only show the number of men who commit crime
from the various separate causes. In logic and philosophy it really
shows that, a certain heredity placed in a certain environment, will
meet obstructions and obstacles. Some heredities will carry men further,
and some environments will overcome them more quickly; but as surely as
effects follow from causes, every heredity will meet disaster in some
way under any environment, and the time and kind of disaster it meets
depend not upon perverseness or freedom of will, but upon the fortune of
the meeting of heredity with the manifold environment that surrounds
every life. It must be plain that life lasts only as long as it makes
adjustme