More pitiful and tragic is the state of the lowest, the lapsed, the untameable of the slums. "Our society," says M. Taine, "is a fine edifice, but in the lowest story what a sink of impurity.... It seems to me that the evil and the good are greater here than in France." The law cannot cure inherent propensities to evil doing, and pious philanthropy can merely patch a rotten vestment; but scientific criminologists will eventually probe to the root. Too long have we relied upon the gaoler and the priest. We are learning now that congenital crime is a subject for the physiologist and the mental pathologist. So, too, with the plague of chronic destitution, the prime infamy of pseudo-civilisation. Instinctive barbaric pity urges liberal almsgiving; but the beautiful emotion of sympathy needs as much control in its gratification as the purely animal appetites. We shall awake soon to the truth that it is our selfish Respectability that must be fought with the weapons of a new economic science, based upon righteousness. We should strive to destroy the sources of hopeless want, as we endeavour to exterminate disease microbes in the body. Are these the visions of Utopianism? No; for when we consider what modern science has done in its infancy, we may surely reckon upon greater victory in days now dawning. To support this inspiring creed of science we do not need to fabricate evidences out of improbability, conjecture, and fallacy; for the proofs are plain and convincing, and will survive the severest criticism. Truly, if we make moan one day for the tenacity of unreason in the human brain, we may rejoice on the morrow in the thought that never in history has the outlook been brighter. It is too evident that thousands who can no longer be satisfied with the guesses of primitive barbarians concerning man's origin and destiny still cover their inner convictions with the cloak of Respectability, and endeavour to seem that which they are not. Honesty will thrive with the wane of Respectability. CHAPTER XI. CONCLUSION. "Respect is often paid in proportion as it is claimed." DR. JOHNSON.