THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 225 



through an hereditary tendency no less inevitable 

 than insanity is subjected to an increase of punish- 

 ment for every fresh offence. We read of miserable 

 men and women who have made repeated appear- 

 ances in a court of justice, and who have passed 

 two-thirds of their lives in prison. Some day the 

 law will recognise that these wretched beings are 

 not criminals in the true sense of the word, but 

 modified lunatics, and will deal with them accord- 

 ingly. In the light of heredity, the administrative 

 methods of Christianity itself appear to call for 

 revision. Religion has ceased in a great measure to 

 concern itself with the cure of the maimed, the halt, 

 and the blind, and it now becomes a question 

 whether moral defects are not largely to be placed 

 in the same category, and whether the object of 

 philanthropists ought not to be to strike at evil in 

 its germ rather than in its fruits. 



It may be that the problems of crime and sin, 

 which have so long baffled law and religion, are not so 

 insoluble after all. Under the enlightened system 

 that we contemplate, all the reforming influences of 

 the world would be brought to bear upon man before 

 he was born and not after. The potter moulds his 

 vessel while his clay is soft, not after it has passed 



Q 



