54 THE MISUSE OF METAPHORS IN 



men and women not only fail, but aggravate the conditions 

 which they are intended to ameliorate. Our charities 

 corrupt them ; the work we proffer them only proves that 

 they are unemployable ; shorter hours of labour and in- 

 creased wages merely give them new opportunities for 

 self-indulgence. We pull down the rookeries and disperse 

 their denizens, but we only scatter the seeds of ill-doing 

 wider and bring down the level of life in new districts. 

 We build night-shelters for the homeless, and thereby 

 increase the facilities for a homeless life. We care for their 

 children, and their vicious parents neglect them the more. 

 In short, our best laid plans seem only to relieve such men 

 and women of the pressure that tends to compel some 

 forethought and to teach them that if they are to live in 

 civilised society they must in some degree fit themselves 

 for civilised life. But all these results are perfectly natural : 

 for a vitiated will must, as a matter of course, convert 

 new circumstances into instruments of the old life, and a 

 weakened, dissipated will must fail to appropriate the good 

 that lies in its environment. The same law holds, of 

 course, in the case of the virtuous will. The spirit made 

 strong in the service of the right finds, even in adverse 

 circumstances, opportunities for moral heroism. 



" Why comes temptation but for man to meet 

 And master, and make crouch beneath his foot 

 And so be pedestalled in triumph ? " 



If it be said that men's lives are too various to permit 

 us to infer such a universal law, and that we exaggerate 

 the power of environment over character if we deny either 

 the lapse of good men into evil ways or the conversion of 

 the evil into good ways, I should reply that in a sense this 



