well.  Perhaps some hard luck or an unfortunate venture on the Board of Trade, or in a faro bank, makes him write a check or note.  He easily convinces himself that he is not getting the salary he earns and that less worthy men prosper while he is poor.  Then too his business calls for better clothes and better surroundings than those of the workingman, and gives him many glimpses of easy lives.  For a time he may escape.  If the amount is not too large it is often passed by without an effort to detect.  Sometimes it escapes notice altogether.  Some business men write so many checks that they take no pains at the end of the month to figure up their account and examine every check, and never notice it unless the balance given by the bank is so far out of the way that it attracts attention.  After a forger grows to be an expert, he can move from town to town.  If he is taken and put in prison and finally released, he is hard to cure.  Forgery is too easy and he knows of no other trade so good.  A large percentage of these men never would have forged, had their wages been higher.  Many others are the victims of the get-rich-quick disease; they haunt the gambling houses, brokers’ offices and the like.  Often when they begin they expect to make the check good; generally, they would have made good if the right card had only turned up in the faro bank, or the right quotation on the stock exchange.

There is another class of forgers, generally bankers, who speculate with trust funds.  To cover up the shortage they sign notes expecting that they will never be presented and will deceive no one but the bank examiner.  If luck goes against them too long, the bank fails and the forgery is discovered.  These are really not forgers, as they never intend to get money on the note.  It is only a part of a means to cover up the use of trust funds.  Of course, these men are never professional forgers, and are much more apt to die from suicide or a broken heart than to repeat.

But with few exceptions, the criminal comes from the walks of the poor and has no education or next to none.  For this society is much to blame.  Sometimes he is obliged to go to work too soon, but often he cannot learn at school.  This is not entirely the fault of the boy’s heredity; it is largely the fault of the school.  A certain course of study has been laid out.  With only slight changes this course has come down from the past and is fixed and formal.  Much of it might be of value to a professional man, but most of it is of no value to the man in other walks of life.  Because a boy cannot learn arithmetic, grammar or geography, or not even learn to read and write, it does not follow that he cannot learn at all.  He may possibly have marked mechanical ability; he may have more than the ordinary powers of adaptation to many kinds of work.  These he could be taught to do and often to do well.  Under proper instruction he might become greatly interested in some kind of work, and in the study to prepare him for the work.  Then too it is more or less misleading to say that an uneducated man commits crime because he is uneducated.  Often his lack of education as well as his crime comes from poverty.  Crime and poverty may come from something else.  All come because he had a poor make-up or an insufficient chance.