that leads them to esteem the types of excellence to which
they themselves approximate as the best, and tastes and habits that are
altogether incongruous with their own as futile and contemptible. It is,
perhaps, most difficult of all to realise the difference of character
and especially of moral sensibility produced by a profound difference of
circumstances. This difficulty largely falsifies our judgments of the
past, and it is the reason why a powerful imagination enabling us to
realise very various characters and very remote circumstances is one of
the first necessities of a great historian. Historians rarely make
sufficient allowance for the degree in which the judgments and
dispositions even of the best men are coloured by the moral tone of the
time, society and profession in which they lived. Yet it is probable
that on the whole we estimate more justly the characters of the past
than of the present. No one would judge the actions of Charlemagne or of
his contemporaries by the strict rules of nineteenth-century ethics. We
feel that though they committed undoubted crimes, these crimes are at
least indefinitely less heinous than they would have been under the
wholly different circumstances and moral atmosphere of our own day. Yet
we seldom apply this method of reasoning to the different strata of the
same society. Men who have been themselves brought up amid all the
comforts and all the moralising and restraining influences of a refined
society, will often judge the crimes of the wretched pariahs of
civilisation as if their acts were in no degree palliated by their
position. They say to themselves 'How guilty should I have been if I
had done this thing,' and their verdict is quite just according to this
statement of the case. They realise the nature of the act. They utterly
fail to realise the character and circumstances of the actor.

And yet it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the difference between the
position of such a critic and that of the children of drunken, ignorant
and profligate parents, born to abject poverty in the slums of our great
cities. From their earliest childhood drunkenness, blasphemy,
dishonesty, prostitution, indecency of every form are their most
familiar experiences. All the social influences, such as they are, are
influences of vice. As they grow up Life seems to them to present little
more than the alternative of hard, ill-paid, and at the same time
precarious labour, probably ending in