It is natural that under certain conditions growth should be downward rather than upward. For the most part our natural tendencies are morally indeterminate, not tendencies to do good things or bad things, but to strive for life and self-expression under the conditions which are offered to us by the environment. These conditions may be such as to appeal mainly to the lower trend and offer little or no stimulus to the higher. Many children are depraved by sensual vices at an age when they have practically no power to refuse them. Or intellect and ambition may be aroused but led to work in directions opposed to the standards of society. Studies of juvenile delinquents have shown how their life is often such as to train good faculties in bad directions. Thus a boy may have a father so unjust that the boy feels justified in resisting and deceiving him. A little later a badly conducted school may make it natural for him to transfer this attitude to his teachers, and so continue to develop a spirit of resistance to authority. At the same time he not improbably finds that his natural intimates, the boys of the neighborhood, are banded together to thwart the police, who, at the bidding of a municipality which has provided no other playground, are repressing games on the street; and if he can help his fellows in this they will make him a leader. Thus the best traits of human nature, ambition, fellowship, self-expression, combine to urge him into what may presently turn out to be a career of crime. In general our principles of selective growth and organization, while they are on the whole upbuilding and progressive, may easily work in an opposite sense. The current as a whole sets onward, but there are many eddies and stagnant places. And if a retrogressive movement is well developed and organized it has the same power as any other to force individuals and lesser movements to adapt themselves to it. It is not necessary that an environment, in order to have a bad influence on a person, should be bad when considered by itself. It is rather a matter of the kind of interaction that takes place, and just as two persons, neither of whom is bad in himself, may have the worst influence on each other, so what would be called a good environment and a good individual may make an unfortunate combination. A carefully brought-up boy sometimes goes wrong at the university because he has not developed self-control enough to make a good use of his freedom; or a man may be driven to drink and despair by getting into an occupation which to another would be quite congenial.