yarns. He would not work for he did not like it. He wanted to go
fishing, hunting, and trapping; so he left home early and took to the
woods.

Max liked nature. He thought he was lots better than town people because
he knew more about nature. He found a lovely spot on the border of a
beautiful lake in New York State, where the rocks are grand, the waters
lovely, the forest glorious. There was never a more charming place in
which to be good and to love God than this place where Max built his
shanty about 1750. But he did not go there to worship or to be good. He
went simply to get away from good people, to get where he would not have
to work, and where he would not be preached to, and this beautiful spot
became a notorious cradle of crime. Nature is lovely, but it makes all
the difference in the world how we know nature and why we love it.

In 1874 Richard L. Dugdale was employed by the New York Prison
Commission to visit the prisons of the state. In this visit he was
surprised to find criminals in six different prisons whose relatives
were mostly criminals or paupers, and the more surprised to discover
that these six criminals, under four different names, were all descended
from the same family. This led Mr. Dugdale to study their relatives,
living and dead. He gave himself up to this work with great zeal,
studying the court and prison records, reports of town poorhouses, and
the testimony of old neighbors and employers. He learned the details of
540 descendants of Max in five generations. He learned the exact facts
about 169 who married into the family. It is customary to count as of
a family the men who marry into it. He traced in part others, which
carried the number up to 1,200 persons of the family of the Jukes.

The Jukes rarely married foreign-born men or women, so that it may be
styled a distinctively American family. The almost universal traits of
the family were idleness, ignorance, and vulgarity. They would not work,
they could not be made to study, and they loved vulgarity. These
characteristics led to disease and disgrace, to pauperism and crime.
They were a disgustingly diseased family as a whole. There were many
imbeciles and many insane. Those of "the Jukes" who tended to pauperism
were rarely criminal, and those who were criminal were rarely paupers.
The sick, the weak, and goody-goody ones were almost all paupers; the
healthy, strong ones were criminals.

It is a well-known fact in sociology that cr