The deliberate promotion of vice under the impulse of gain comes naturally in to exploit the weak places in human nature. It has been shown in the case of sexual licentiousness that the natural sensuality and weakness of men and women but partly explain its prevalence; we have to add the coaxing and stimulation of an organized propaganda. Miss Addams, in her work A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, describes the corruption of children, intentional and unintentional, on a large scale. Their minds are tainted by shows, dance-halls, overcrowding, contact with the licentious class, and finally by deliberate training in vice. Much the same may be said of drink, gambling, and theft, not to speak of the more intangible forms of corruption rife in business and politics. Organization of this sort arises spontaneously, as it were, out of the universal appetite for gain and the obvious weaknesses of human nature; it therefore almost always enters the field ahead of the organization aiming to counteract it—the legal restrictions, educational and rescue work, social centres, and the like—and is likely to flourish almost unchecked in a raw civilization. It owes its strength no more to gross passions than to the absence of alternatives that enables it to pervert to base uses the finer impulses, those calling for companionship, recreation, cheerful and unconstraining surroundings. _PART IV_ SOCIAL FACTORS IN BIOLOGICAL SURVIVAL CHAPTER XVIII PROCESS, BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT—THEIR DISTINCTIVE FUNCTIONS—THE SPECIAL CHARACTER OF HUMAN HEREDITY—INTERACTION OF THE TWO PROCESSES—POSSIBLE ANTAGONISM—THE MORAL ASPECT—PRACTICAL DIFFICULTY OF DISTINGUISHING THE TWO—FUTILITY OF THE USUAL CONTROVERSY In a large view, heredity and environment are not opposing influences, as is commonly imagined, but complementary and co-operating organs of life, each having its appropriate part to play in the great whole. They are like man and woman, in that the question regarding them is not which is greater or more indispensable, but just what are their respective functions, and how do they or should they work together. Those men of science who, lacking comprehensive views, have stated the problem as one of “nature _versus_ nurture” have merely fallen in with the popular misapprehension. It is quite as if they had stated the problem of the family as one of man _versus_ woman. Heredity gives some men an ambitious spirit, and this is neither more nor less important than the direction their ambition takes, which is a matter of environment; they are different kinds of things and cannot well be weighed against each other. No more was the military talent, let us say, of General Grant more or less important to his life than the outbreak of the Civil War, which gave it a chance to develop.