ner. Am I to understand that crime is
nowadays looked upon as the recurrence of an ancestral trait?"

"I beg your pardon," said Dr. Leete with a smile half humorous, half
deprecating, "but since you have so explicitly asked the question, I am
forced to say that the fact is precisely that."

After what I had already learned of the moral contrasts between the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, it was doubtless absurd in me
to begin to develop sensitiveness on the subject, and probably if Dr.
Leete had not spoken with that apologetic air and Mrs. Leete and Edith
shown a corresponding embarrassment, I should not have flushed, as I
was conscious I did.

"I was not in much danger of being vain of my generation before," I
said; "but, really--"

"This is your generation, Mr. West," interposed Edith. "It is the one
in which you are living, you know, and it is only because we are alive
now that we call it ours."

"Thank you. I will try to think of it so," I said, and as my eyes met
hers their expression quite cured my senseless sensitiveness. "After
all," I said, with a laugh, "I was brought up a Calvinist, and ought
not to be startled to hear crime spoken of as an ancestral trait."

"In point of fact," said Dr. Leete, "our use of the word is no
reflection at all on your generation, if, begging Edith's pardon, we
may call it yours, so far as seeming to imply that we think ourselves,
apart from our circumstances, better than you were. In your day fully
nineteen twentieths of the crime, using the word broadly to include all
sorts of misdemeanors, resulted from the inequality in the possessions
of individuals; want tempted the poor, lust of greater gains, or the
desire to preserve former gains, tempted the well-to-do. Directly or
indirectly, the desire for money, which then meant every good thing,
was the motive of all this crime, the taproot of a vast poison growth,
which the machinery of law, courts, and police could barely prevent
from choking your civilization outright. When we made the nation the
sole trustee of the wealth of the people, and guaranteed to all
abundant maintenance, on the one hand abolishing want, and on the other
checking the accumulation of riches, we cut this root, and the poison
tree that overshadowed your society withered, like Jonah's gourd, in a
day. As for the comparatively small class of violent crimes against
persons, unconnected with any idea of gain, they were almost wholly
confined, even