While we have an idle rich, and a hungry and ignorant poor, we cannot get rid of vice and crime. To punish the criminals we have made, is unjust and useless; to pray for deliverance from plague: we must look to the drains--we must improve the environment. No man should be idle. No man should be rich. No man should be ignorant, no man destitute. Every man should have a chance to earn the essentials to a wholesome, happy, temperate, and useful life. Every child should be nourished, and taught, and trained. Crime, vice, disease, poverty, idleness: all these are preventable evils. But we cannot drain our marshes, because, little as we heed the misery of the people, the ignorance and hunger of the children, the despair of the men and the degradation of the women, we are marvellously tender of Grand Ducal sport. It is Mammon we worship, not God; it is property we prize, not life; it is vanity we love, and not our fellow-creatures. We are an ignorant, atavistic people; and our priests are wondrous moral. CHAPTER FOURTEEN--SOME OBJECTIONS ANSWERED THE upholders of the doctrine of free will commonly fall into the error of considering heredity and environment apart from each other. Father Adderley, in a lecture given at Saltley, told his hearers that "all our great scientists agree that people have the power to overcome their hereditary tendencies." Perhaps: but they can only get that power from environment; and if the environment is bad they will not get that power. But the most surprising example of this mental squinting is afforded by the Rev. C. A. Hall, who may be said to squint with both eyes. For, in a lecture given at Paisley, this gentleman first shows that we can overcome our heredity, and then shows that we can overcome our environment And yet it never occurred to him that to prove the freedom of the will we must be able to overcome our heredity and environment together. Mr. Hall's argument may be stated thus: By the aid of environment we can overcome our heredity; by the aid of heredity, or of good environment we can overcome bad environment; therefore we are superior to heredity and environment. It is like saying: by means of natural intelligence and a good teacher I can become a good scholar; by means of natural intelligence and a good teacher I can correct the errors of a bad teacher. Therefore I do not depend upon intelligence nor teaching for my knowledge. But I have answered Messrs. Adderley and Hall in my chapter on self-control. An example of a similar error is afforded by a clergyman who wrote to me from Warrington. He said: You can never hope to improve the social environment until you _persuade_ men that they can rise superior to their circumstances.