What is worse, this sentimentalism results in attaching a sort of romantic glamour to its objects. Just as the Sunday-school teaching virgin, beginning by trying to save the Chinese laundryman's soul, commonly ends by falling in love with him, so the virtuoso of any other sort of charity commonly ends by endowing its beneficiary with a variety of imaginary virtues. Sympathy, by some subtle alchemy, is converted into a sneaking admiration. "Blessed are the poor in spirit" becomes "Blessed are the poor." This exaltation of inefficiency, it must be manifest, is a dangerous error. There is, in fact, nothing at all honorable about unfitness, considered in the mass. On the contrary, it is invariably a symptom of actual dishonor--of neglect, laziness, ignorance and depravity--if not primarily in the individual himself, then at least in his forebears, whose weakness he carries on. It is highly important that this fact should be kept in mind by the human race, that the essential inferiority of the inefficient should be insisted upon, that the penalties of deliberate slackness should be swift and merciless. But as it is, those penalties are too often reduced to nothing by charity, while the offense they should punish is elevated to a fictitious martyrdom. Thus we have charity converted into an instrument of debauchery. Thus we have it playing the part of an active agent of decay, and so increasing the hazards of life on earth. "We may compare civilized man," says Sir Ray Lankester,[4] "to a successful rebel against nature, who by every step forward renders himself liable to greater and greater penalties." No need to offer cases in point. Every one of us knows what the Poor Laws of England have accomplished in a hundred years--how they have multiplied misery enormously and created a caste of professional paupers--how they have seduced that caste downward into depths of degradation untouched by any other civilized race in history--and how, by hanging the crushing burden of that caste about the necks of the English people, they have helped to weaken and sicken the whole stock and to imperil the future of the nation.