And yet it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the difference between the position of such a critic and that of the children of drunken, ignorant and profligate parents, born to abject poverty in the slums of our great cities. From their earliest childhood drunkenness, blasphemy, dishonesty, prostitution, indecency of every form are their most familiar experiences. All the social influences, such as they are, are influences of vice. As they grow up Life seems to them to present little more than the alternative of hard, ill-paid, and at the same time precarious labour, probably ending in the poor-house, or crime with its larger and swifter gains, and its intervals of coarse pleasure probably, though not certainly, followed by the prison or an early death. They see indeed, like figures in a dream, or like beings of another world, the wealthy and the luxurious spending their wealth and their time in many kinds of enjoyment, but to the very poor pleasure scarcely comes except in the form of the gin palace or perhaps the low music hall. And in many cases they have come into this reeking atmosphere of temptation and vice with natures debased and enfeebled by a long succession of vicious hereditary influences, with weak wills, with no faculties of mind or character that can respond to any healthy ambition; with powerful inborn predispositions to evil. The very mould of their features, the very shape of their skulls, marks them out as destined members of the criminal class. Even here, no doubt, there is a difference between right and wrong; there is scope for the action of free will; there are just causes of praise and blame, and Society rightly protects itself by severe penalties against the crimes that are most natural; but what human judge can duly measure the scale of moral guilt? or what comparison can there be between the crimes that are engendered by such circumstances and those which spring up in the homes of refined and well-regulated comfort?