He said: “When you consider it, what we are all trying to do nowadays is--vulgarly--to improve the breed; but we go to work in a round-about way. At the outset we are met by the depreciated state of part of the existing generation; and one problem is to prevent these depreciated people from increasing, or to get them to increase healthily. No one seems to have gone directly to such a problem as that. The difficulties to be faced are tremendous. Your dirtiest British youngster is hedged round with principles of an inviolable liberty and rights of Habeas Corpus. You let his father and mother, or any one who will save you the trouble of looking after him, mould him in his years of tenderness as they please. If they happen to leave him a walking invalid, you take him into the poorhouse; if they bring him up a thief, you whip him and keep him at high cost at Millbank or Dartmoor; if his passions, never controlled, break out into murder and rape, you may hang him, unless his crime has been so atrocious as to attract the benevolent interest of the Home Secretary; if he commit suicide, you hold a coroner's inquest, which also costs money; and however he dies you give him a deal coffin and bury him. Yet I may prove to you that this being, whom you treat like a dog at a fair, never had a day's--no, nor an hour's--contact with goodness, purity, truth, or even human kindness; never had an opportunity of learning anything better. What right have you then to hunt him like a wild beast, and kick him and whip him, and fetter him and hang him by expensive complicated machinery, when you have done nothing to teach him any of the duties of a citizen?” “Stop, stop, Sir Charles! you are too virulent. There are endless means of improving your lad--charities without number----” “Yes, that will never reach him.” “Never mind, they may, you know. Industrial schools, reformatories, asylums, hospitals, Peabody-buildings, poor-laws. Everybody is working to improve the condition of the poor man. Sanitary administration goes to his house and makes it habitable.” “Very,” interjected Sir Charles Sterling, dryly. “Factory laws protect and educate factory children----” “They don't educate in one case out of ten. They don't feed them, clothe them, give them amusement and cultivation, do they?” “Certainly not--that would be ridiculous.” “Why, the question is whether that would be ridiculous!” replied Sir Charles. “I do not say it can be done, but in order to transform the next generation, what we should aim at is to provide substitutes for bad homes, evil training, unhealthy air, food and dulness, and terrible ignorance, in happier scenes, better teaching, proper conditions of physical life, sane amusements, and a higher cultivation. I dare say you would think me a lunatic if I proposed that Government should establish music-halls and gymnasia all over the country; but you, Mr. Fissure, voted for the Baths and Washhouses.”