A man is
never anything but what his outside influences have made him. They train
him downward or they train him upward--but they TRAIN him; they are at
work upon him all the time.

Y.M. Then if he happen by the accidents of life to be evilly placed
there is no help for him, according to your notions--he must train
downward.

O.M. No help for him? No help for this chameleon? It is a mistake. It is
in his chameleonship that his greatest good fortune lies. He has only to
change his habitat--his ASSOCIATIONS. But the impulse to do it must come
from the OUTSIDE--he cannot originate it himself, with that purpose in
view. Sometimes a very small and accidental thing can furnish him the
initiatory impulse and start him on a new road, with a new idea. The
chance remark of a sweetheart, "I hear that you are a coward," may water
a seed that shall sprout and bloom and flourish, and ended in producing
a surprising fruitage--in the fields of war. The history of man is full
of such accidents. The accident of a broken leg brought a profane and
ribald soldier under religious influences and furnished him a new ideal.
From that accident sprang the Order of the Jesuits, and it has been
shaking thrones, changing policies, and doing other tremendous work for
two hundred years--and will go on. The chance reading of a book or of
a paragraph in a newspaper can start a man on a new track and make him
renounce his old associations and seek new ones that are IN SYMPATHY
WITH HIS NEW IDEAL: and the result, for that man, can be an entire
change of his way of life.

Y.M. Are you hinting at a scheme of procedure?

O.M. Not a new one--an old one. Old as mankind.

Y.M. What is it?

O.M. Merely the laying of traps for people. Traps baited with INITIATORY
IMPULSES TOWARD HIGH IDEALS. It is what the tract-distributor does. It
is what the missionary does. It is what governments ought to do.

Y.M. Don't they?

O.M. In one way they do, in another they don't. They separate the
smallpox patients from the healthy people, but in dealing with crime
they put the healthy into the pest-house along with the sick. That is to
say, they put the beginners in with the confirmed criminals. This would
be well if man were naturally inclined to good, but he isn't, and so
ASSOCIATION makes the beginners worse than they were when they went into
captivity. It is putting a very severe punishment upon the comparatively
innocent at times. They hang a man--which is a trifl