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?

Nor indeed even in this latter case is a really accurate judgment
possible. Men are born into the world with both wills and passions of
varying strength, though in mature life the strength or weakness of each
is largely due to their own conduct. With different characters the same
temptation, operating under the same external circumstances, has
enormously different strength, and very few men can fully realise the
strength of a passion which they have never themselves experienced. To
repeat an illustration I have already used, how difficult is it for a
constitutionally sober man to form in his own mind an adequate
conception of the force of the temptation of drink to a dipsomaniac, or
for a passionless man to conceive rightly the temptations of a
profoundly sensual nature! I have spoken in a former chapter of the
force with which bodily conditions act upon happiness. Their influence
on morals is not less terrible. There are diseases well known to
physicians which make the most placid temper habitually irritable;
give a morbid turn to the healthiest disposition;