Scamps, and the College
for Complete Criminal Education, would it be reasonable to expect a
Francois Xavier or a Henry Martyn to be the result of such a training?
The traditionists, in whose presumptuous hands the science of
anthropology has been trusted from time immemorial, have insisted on
eliminating cause and effect from the domain of morals. When they have
come across a moral monster they have seemed to think that he put himself
together, having a free choice of all the constituents which make up
manhood, and that consequently no punishment could be too bad for him.

I say, hang him and welcome, if that is the best thing for society; hate
him, in a certain sense, as you hate a rattlesnake, but, if you pretend
to be a philosopher, recognize the fact that what you hate in him is
chiefly misfortune, and that if you had been born with his villanous low
forehead and poisoned instincts, and bred among creatures of the Races
Maudites whose natural history has to be studied like that of beasts of
prey and vermin, you would not have been sitting there in your gold-bowed
spectacles and passing judgment on the peccadilloes of your
fellow-creatures.

I have seen men and women so disinterested and noble, and devoted to the
best works, that it appeared to me if any good and faithful servant was
entitled to enter into the joys of his Lord, such as these might be. But
I do not know that I ever met with a human being who seemed to me to have
a stronger claim on the pitying consideration and kindness of his Maker
than a wretched, puny, crippled, stunted child that I saw in Newgate, who
was pointed out as one of the most notorious and inveterate little
thieves in London. I have no doubt that some of those who were looking
at this pitiable morbid secretion of the diseased social organism thought
they were very virtuous for hating him so heartily.

It is natural, and in one sense is all right enough. I want to catch a
thief and put the extinguisher on an incendiary as much as my neighbors
do; but I have two sides to my consciousness as I have two sides to my
heart, one carrying dark, impure blood, and the other the bright stream
which has been purified and vivified by the great source of life and
death,--the oxygen of the air which gives all things their vital heat,
and burns all things at last to ashes.

One side of me loves and hates; the other side of me judges, say rather
pleads and suspends judgment. I think, if I were le