always cowardly about everything they do, and never have the pluck to
steal chickens even until they are half drunk. They often commit murder,
but only when they are detected in some sneaking crime and shoot because
they are too cowardly to face their discoverer.

Now the Jukes were almost never of the first or second class. They could
not be criminals that required capital, brains, education or nerve. Even
the kind of pauperism and crime in which they indulged was particularly
disgraceful. This is inevitably true of all classes of people who
combine idleness, ignorance, and vulgarity. They are not even
respectable among criminals and paupers.

There is an honorable pauperism. It is no disgrace to be poor or to be
in a poorhouse if there is a good reason for it. One may be manly in
poverty. But the Jukes were never manly or honorable paupers, they were
weaklings among paupers.

They were a great expense to the state, costing in crime and pauperism
more than $1,250,000. Taken as a whole, they not only did not contribute
to the world's prosperity, but they cost more than $1,000 a piece,
including all men, women, and children, for pauperism and crime.

Those who worked did the lowest kind of service and received the
smallest wages. Only twenty of the 1,200 learned a trade, and ten of
those learned it in the state prison. Even they were not regularly
employed. Men who work regularly even at unskilled labor are generally
honest men and provide for the family. A habit of irregular work is a
species of mental or moral weakness, or both. A man or woman who will
not stick to a job is morally certain to be a pauper or a criminal.