Suppose that a child of Twentieth-Century parents could be born into the environment of an earlier century. Would he grow up with the ideas of to-day, or with the ideas of those who taught and trained him? Most certainly he would fall into step with his environment: he would think with those with whom he lived, and from whom he learnt. Born into ancient Athens, he would look upon slavery as a quite natural and proper thing born into ancient Scandinavia, he would grow up a Viking, would worship Thor and Odin, and would adopt piracy as the only profession for a man of honour born into the environment of the Spanish prime, he would think it a righteous act to roast heretics or to break Lutherans on the wheel. Born into the fanatical environment of Sixteenth-Century France, he would have no scruples against assisting in the holy massacre of St. Bartholomew's. Born a Turk, he would believe the Koran, and accept polygamy and slavery. Born a Red Indian, he would scalp his slain or wounded enemies, and torture his prisoners. Born amongst cannibals, he would devour his aged relatives, and his faded wives, and most of the foes made captive to his bow and spear. Suppose a child of modern English family could be born into the environment of Fourteenth-Century England! He would surely believe in the Roman Catholic religion, in a personal devil, and in a hell of everlasting fire. He would believe that the sun goes round the world, and that any person who thought otherwise was a child of the devil, and ought to be broiled piously and slowly at a fire of green faggots. He would accept slave-dealing, witch-burning, the Star Chamber, the whipping-post, the pillory, and the forcing of evidence by torture, as comfortably as we now accept the cat-o'-nine-tails, the silent system, and the gallows. He would look upon education, sanitation, and science as black magic and defiance of God. He would never have learnt from Copernicus, Newton, Harvey, Bacon, Spencer, Darwin, Edison, or Pasteur. He would be ignorant of Shakespeare, Cromwell, the French Revolution, the Emancipation of Slaves, the Factory Acts, and the Household Franchise. He would never have heard of electricity, steam, cheap books, the free Press, the School Board, the Fabian Society. He would never have heard of the Australian Colonies, of the Indian Empire, of the United States of America, nor of Buonaparte, George Washington, Nelson, Queen Elizabeth, Abraham Lincoln, nor Florence Nightingale. Not one of these great men, not one of these great things would form a part of his environment. Nor may we lightly claim that he, himself, would be of a more highly developed type, that his propensities would be more humane, his nature more refined. For we must not overlook such examples as Alfred the Great, Joan of Arc, Chaucer, Mallory, and Sir Thomas More.