Each of us, I suppose, knows that he has weaknesses that his will has been unable to overcome, that he has had times of defeat when the assailing forces, if persistent, would have crushed his character, that he has had friends, no worse than himself, whose characters have been crushed. We had better, then, say nothing of the unlimited power of the human will, but ascribe our escape to a preponderance of favoring conditions. It seems strange, when you think of it, that we have pity and hospitals for the sick in body, but for sick spirits—often a more deadly illness—we have no hospitals (except for the insane), few skilled physicians, and very little understanding. I suppose it is because this kind of trouble is not tangible enough to impress itself upon us, and also because we shun the effort of the imagination that would be required to understand it. Here, certainly, is a field for “social work.” One often encounters the doctrine that reforms are useless and even harmful, because temptation alone can strengthen the will, as when Sir Thomas Browne says that “They that endeavor to abolish Vice destroy also Virtue; for contraries, although they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.” The argument is constantly used against the restriction of prostitution and the liquor traffic. Now, it is true that the will grows by exercise. Life is ever a struggle, a struggle, moreover, in which there must always, probably, be more or less failure. We may agree with Milton when he says, advocating the knowledge of evil: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”[39] But what is commonly overlooked is that, since this is an onward world, the struggle ought to keep rising to higher levels, and that unnecessary struggle is mere waste and dissipation. We do not need to preserve evil, as the English preserve foxes, for the exercise of hunting it. And yet poverty, disease and vice are frequently upheld on this ground. There is no danger that struggle will disappear, so long as human energy remains: if it is no longer against drink or licentiousness or war, it can go on to something higher. Every temptation is a conflict, and if it is not a necessary conflict it is a waste of strength: to contend over and over again with the _same_ temptation is a sign of arrested development. Solicitation merely defiles the mind, and a community which tolerates preventable vice wrongs itself in the same way as a man who reads a salacious book.