d I think
more."

"I don't quite understand you," I said. "Atavism in my day was a word
applied to the cases of persons in whom some trait of a remote
ancestor recurred in a noticeable manner. Am I to understand that
crime is nowadays looked upon as the recurrence of an ancestral
trait?"

"I beg your pardon," said Dr. Leete with a smile half humorous, half
deprecating, "but since you have so explicitly asked the question, I
am forced to say that the fact is precisely that."

After what I had already learned of the moral contrasts between the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, it was doubtless absurd in me
to begin to develop sensitiveness on the subject, and probably if Dr.
Leete had not spoken with that apologetic air and Mrs. Leete and Edith
shown a corresponding embarrassment, I should not have flushed, as I
was conscious I did.

"I was not in much danger of being vain of my generation before," I
said; "but, really"--

"This is your generation, Mr. West," interposed Edith. "It is the one
in which you are living, you know, and it is only because we are alive
now that we call it ours."

"Thank you. I will try to think of it so," I said, and as my eyes met
hers their expression quite cured my senseless sensitiveness. "After
all," I said, with a laugh, "I was brought up a Calvinist, and ought
not to be startled to hear crime spoken of as an ancestral trait."

"In point of fact," said Dr. Leete, "our use of the word is no
reflection at all on your generation, if, begging Edith's pardon, we
may call it yours, so far as seeming to imply that we think ourselves,
apart from our circumstances, better than you were. In your day fully
nineteen twentieths of the crime, using the word broadly to include
all sorts of misdemeanors, resulted from the inequality in the
possessions of individuals; want tempted the poor, lust of greater
gains, or the desire to preserve former gains, tempted the well-to-do.
Directly or indirectly, the desire for money, which then meant every
good thing, was the motive of all this crime, the taproot of a vast
poison growth, which the machinery of law, courts, and police could
barely prevent from choking your civilization outright. When we made
the nation the sole trustee of the wealth of the people, and
guaranteed to all abundant maintenance, on the one hand abolishing
want, and on the other checking the accumulation of riches, we cut
this root, and the poison tree that overshadowed your so