DARROW CONDEMNS OUR LEGAL SYSTEM IN TALK

Clarence Darrow, speaking to an audience of students that filled every seat of the Paine Hall and lined itself five deep across the back of the room, scored our modern legal, criminal and educational systems. Going to the very heart of his subject, he discussed crime in every phase of its development. Taking up the definition of crime first he showed how indeterminate a quality it is. He then passed to the punishment of crime and showed its accompanying ill effects. In concluding he placed all his stress on the training of children, offering them proper vocational guidance so that they would not be forced by poverty into committing robbery and other property crimes.

He opened his lecture, after being introduced by Professor K.F. Mather with a definition of a criminal. "A criminal," he said, "is one who has been convicted of violating a law of the land. It is a recognized fact that there are a great many laws which are violated every day. Some people are too good to obey the laws, or too thirsty. As a result of this constant violation it is hard to tell what is right and what is wrong." He went on to show that neither laws nor religions could determine right and wrong and proved his statements with forceful examples. "It can not be conscience that determines this difference," he went on, "for that is merely a state of mind and varies with the institutions of a community. It a Turkish woman is seen on the streets unveiled she is conscience stricken, but this is not the case with young girls in America. People are constantly adjusting themselves to innovations. You even get used to thinking of short dressess, I've gotten so that I' look at girls' faces again."

He continued, always keeping his audience's interest at a high point with concrete stories, and showed how every individual is controlled by heredity and environment. After making his point he drew the logical conclusion that if a man is controlled by society and can exert very little control over his actions, society has no right to punish him for action it has taught him itself.

"Why do people steal, cheat, and kill?" he asked his audience. "Does punishment keep them from doing, these things? So far the world have always been poor," and with wonderful irony, "rich people don't go to jail because they are all good."

Going on Mr. Darrow showed that criminals, besides being poor were al- most always poorly educated. With our present system, he showed, great numbers of young people are forced through the required number of schools years and are then thrown, without any means of support out into the world to shift for themselves. Quite naturally a great number of young people who were born morons are not fitted for intellectual work with out the necessary training they are unable to do other skilled work, and soon sink to a position in which they can only kep alive by petty larceny.

Throughout his speech, Mr. Darrow showed that he was not dealing with crimes of passion and in closing, be stated that no machinery of law would ever be able to stop them. The natural conclusion as to whether capital punishment should be enforced or not was left to the listener