of crowding interferences, until
they get to look upon Hottentots and Indians--and a good many of their
own race--as a kind of self-conscious blood-clocks with very limited
power of self-determination. That's the _tendency_, I say, of
a doctor's experience. But the people to whom they address their
statements of the results of their observation belong to the thinking
class of the highest races, and _they_ are conscious of a great deal of
liberty of will. So in the face of the fact that civilization with all
it offers has proved a dead failure with the aboriginal races of this
country,--on the whole, I say, a dead failure,--they talk as if they
knew from their own will all about that of a Digger Indian! We are more
apt to go by observation of the facts in the case. We are constantly
seeing weakness where you see depravity. I don't say we're _right_; I
only tell what you must often find to be the fact, right or wrong, in
talking with doctors. You see, too, our notions of bodily and moral
disease, or sin, are apt to go together. We used to be as hard on
sickness as you were on sin. We know better now. We don't look at
sickness as we used to, and try to poison, it with everything that is
offensive,--burnt toads and earth-worms and viper-broth, and worse
things than these. We know that disease has something back of it which
the body isn't to blame for, at least in most cases, and which very
often it is trying to get rid of. Just so with sin. I will agree to take
a hundred new-born babes of a certain stock and return seventy-five of
them in a dozen years true and honest, if not 'pious' children. And I
will take another hundred, of a different stock, and put them in the
hands of certain Ann-Street teachers, and seventy-five of them will be
thieves and liars at the end of the same dozen years. I have heard of
an old character, Colonel Jaques, I believe it was, a famous
cattle-breeder, who used to say he could breed to pretty much any
pattern he wanted to. Well, we doctors see so much of families, how the
tricks of the blood keep breaking out, just as much in character as they
do in looks, that we can't help feeling as if a great many people hadn't
a fair chance to be what is called 'good,' and that there isn't a text
in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, 'Judge
not, that ye be not judged.'

"As for our getting any quarter at the hands of theologians, we don't
expect it, and have no right to. You don't