Some time, it will be found that people can be changed only by changing their surroundings. It is alleged that, at least ninety-five per cent. of the criminals transported from England to Australia and other penal colonies, became good and useful citizens in a new world. Free from former associates and associations, from the necessities of a hard, cruel, and competitive civilization, they became, for the most part, honest people. This immense fact throws more light upon social questions than all the theories of the world. All people are not able to support themselves. They lack intelligence, industry, cunning--in short, capacity. They are continually falling by the way. In the midst of plenty, they are hungry. Larceny is born of want and opportunity. In passion's storm, the will is wrecked upon the reefs and rocks of crime. The complex, tangled web of thought and dream, of perception and memory, of imagination and judgment, of wish and will and want--the woven wonder of a life--has never yet been raveled back to simple threads. Shall we not become charitable and just, when we know that every act is but condition's fruit; that Nature, with her countless hands, scatters the seeds of tears and crimes--of every virtue and of every joy; that all the base and vile are victims of the Blind, and that the good and great have, in the lottery of life, by chance or fate, drawn heart and brain? Washington, December 21, 1881. PREFACE TO "MEN, WOMEN AND GODS." NOTHING gives me more pleasure, nothing gives greater promise for the future, than the fact that woman is achieving intellectual and physical liberty. It is refreshing to know that here, in our country, there are thousands of women who think, and express their thoughts--who are thoroughly free and thoroughly conscientious--who have neither been narrowed nor corrupted by a heartless creed--who do not worship a being in heaven whom they would shudderingly loathe on earth--women who do not stand before the altar of a cruel faith, with downcast eyes of timid acquiescence, and pay to impudent authority the tribute of a thoughtless yes. They are no longer satisfied with being told. They examine for themselves. They have ceased to be the prisoners of society--the satisfied serfs of husbands, or the echoes of priests. They demand the rights that naturally belong to intelligent human beings. If wives, they wish to be the equals of husbands. If mothers, they wish to rear their children in the atmosphere of love, liberty and philosophy. They believe that woman can discharge all her duties without the aid of superstition, and preserve all that is true, pure, and tender, without sacrificing in the temple of absurdity the convictions of the soul.