I have mentioned environment above. It is not only a restraining and quasi-licensing, but also an educational force. There are, I fear, in every community, especially on the Pacific Coast, many young persons, who, lacking in fixed moral principles and habits of life like the sensitive and impressionable chameleon, assuming the color of the bark on the tree which for a time is its home--take on the moral coloring of the society in which they move, and become for a time, at least, an embodiment of its moral tone. But let the conditions change--let such persons migrate and become residents of a society of darker moral hue and of lower moral tone--and, like the chameleon, they almost immediately take on the darkened coloring and echo the lower tone. If it is their nature to command, they become leaders in a career of associated viciousness or infamously distinguished in the line of individual criminality. The general result is, however, that having broken loose from their moral moorings, they drift as hopeless, purposeless wrecks on the sea of life. During my residence on the Pacific Coast I have known many sad instances of this degeneration, and our own beautiful and prosperous city has not been free from such sad examples. It is a true, if not an inspired saying that "evil communications corrupt good manners." It is more emphatically true that evil associations corrupt good morals, which was probably the meaning intended by the translators. I have mentioned religious belief as an element in the formation of character. The doctrine of no religious teacher has ever exercised such a dominating and controlling force in the formation of character in the civilized world, as have the doctrines of Christ. Before His advent the learned world received the philosophy of Aristotle, as a sufficient basis of moral doctrine and civic virtue. But that philosophy, great as it was, and impinging as it often did on the domain of absolute truth, has as a system of moral conduct, given way or been subordinated to the clear, direct yet simple enunciation of Christ, summed up in that grand and universally applicable rule of individual and civil conduct: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." A character in which this doctrine forms the basis will always respond to the demands of honor and right. These observations must answer as a preface, or, as Horace Greely once styled such performances, as "preliminary egotism." Autobiography