influences, the effect of regular labor and
discipline, and, above all, the power of Religion, awaken these hidden
tendencies to good, both those coming from many generations of
comparative virtue and those inherent in the soul, while they control
and weaken and cause to be forgotten those diseased appetites or extreme
passions which these unfortunate creatures inherit directly, and
substitute a higher moral sense for the low moral instincts which they
obtained from their parents. So it happens, also, that American life, as
compared with European, and city life, as compared with country,
produces similar results. In the United States, a boundless hope
pervades all classes; it reaches down to the outcast and vagrant. There
is no fixity, as is so often the fact in Europe, from the sense of
despair. Every individual, at least till he is old, hopes and expects to
rise out of his condition.

The daughter of the rag-picker or vagrant sees the children she knows,
continually dressing better or associating with more decent people; she
beholds them attending the public schools and improving in education and
manners; she comes in contact with the greatest force the poor
know--public opinion, which requires a certain decency and
respectability among themselves. She becomes ashamed of her squalid,
ragged, or drunken mother. She enters an Industrial School, or creeps
into a Ward School, or "goes out" as a servant. In every place, she
feels the profound forces of American life; the desire of equality,
ambition to rise, the sense of self-respect and the passion for
education.

These new desires overcome the low appetites in her blood, and she
continually rises and improves. If Religion in any form reach her, she
attains a still greater height over the sensual and filthy ways of her
parents. She is in no danger of sexual degradation, or of any extreme
vice. The poison in her blood has found an antidote. When she marries,
it will inevitably be with a class above her own. This process goes on
continually throughout the country, and breaks up criminal inheritance.

Moreover, the incessant change of our people, especially in cities, the
separation of children from parents, of brothers from sisters, and of
all from their former localities, destroy that continuity of influence
which bad parents and grandparents exert, and do away with those
neighborhoods of crime and pauperism where vice concentrates and
transmits itself with ever-increas