der the way in
which it appears to the violator of right--the way in which things look
to him who works _inside_ the web of guilt. And we may be sure that it
does not look to him as it does to us from the midst of respectabilities
and comforts, or from a high intellectual and moral stand-point. Now I
am not going to justify crime, or to indulge any sentiment upon the
subject. But, really, one of the most practical questions that can be
asked is--"_Why_ is this one, or that one, a criminal?" Do I say that
the guilt should be imputed to the condition--that it is all owing to
circumstances? No: but I _do_ say that, in nine cases out of ten, crime
is no proof of _special_ depravity apart from _general_ depravity, and
that the circumstances have just so much weight as this--that put you or
me in those same circumstances, in nine cases out of ten, we should be
criminals too. In the same circumstances, my friends; and this involves
a great deal. It involves an hereditary taint stamped in the very mould
of birth; it involves physical misery; it involves intellectual and
moral destitution; it involves the worst kind of social influence; it
involves the pressure of all the natural appetites, rioting in this need
of the body and this darkness of the soul. And it implies no suspicion
of a man's moral standard--it is no insult to his self-respect--to tell
him that, under similar conditions, it is extremely probable he would
have been a criminal too. Reasoning in an arm-chair is very proper, and
often very accurate, but the logic of starvation is too peremptory for
syllogisms. There is a sort of compound made up of frost, damp, dirt and
rags, which works double magic: it sometimes converts a thief into a
philosopher, and sometimes a philosopher into a thief. I am not
speaking, however, of the mere impulse of animal want, but of this
condition where the counter-acting forces are dormant. And for this
reason you and I can draw no immoral conclusion from the doctrine of
circumstances. We could not be like the moral leper who infests the dark
regions of the city--we could not be like the child of sin and shame who
broods there--without losing our identity. In contemplating this matter,
the feeling for ourselves should be simply one of humility and
thankfulness. We have grown up in pure light and air, appeased with the
comforts, and braced by at least the current morality of society. But,
concerning those degraded ones, what some call "char