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STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL 



A 



good morally, and often as high intellectually, as the middle 

 and upper classes who look down upon them as in every 

 way their inferiors. _ Their degraded condition, socially 

 and morally, is the work of society; and in so Tar as^ they 

 appear worse than others they are made so by society. 

 What should we ourselves have been if we had had no 

 education, no repose, no refined or decent homes, no means 

 of cleanliness, which is not only next to, but is a source 

 of, godliness ; surrounded by every kind of temptation, and 

 not unfrequently forced into crime ? And a direct con- 

 sequence of the millions who are compelled to lead such 

 lives are the millions of infants who die prematurely — a 

 slaughter a thousand times worse than that of Herod, 

 going on year by year in our midst ; surely their innocent 

 blood cries out against our rulers, against all of us, who 

 choose such rulers ; and more especially against those 

 Spiritualists and Christians, who know the higher law, 

 if they do not work with all their strength for a radical 

 reform. 



I ask you to think over this question ; and above all 

 things, I ask you to consider the necessity for real and 

 fundamental remedies, not mere palliatives, which have 

 been tried with ever-increasing energy and good-will 

 throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, and 

 have absolutely failed. The evil has grown, just as if no 

 such remedies had been applied ac all. Charity has 

 increased enormously, and has completely failed. Now it 

 is time for us to try Justice. 



A few years since a talented writer used, and at once 

 popularized, a new term — "ecjuality of opportimity." It 

 expresses, briefly and forcibTyT^hat may be^ermed the 

 minimum of social justice. The same idea had been 

 urged by other writers, especially by Herbert Spencer in his 

 volume on "Justice," when he declared that justice 

 requires every man to receive "the results of his own 

 nature and consequent actions" — this and this only. 

 Fundamentally, the two ideas are the same, but " equality 

 of opportunity" is the more simple and intelligible ex- 

 ression of it. 

 ?o Christians and Spiritualists, who realize that every 



