ioo Heredity, Variation and Genius 



combinations ; for while individual persons are 

 seldom without some altruistic feeling, corporate 

 unions are many times entirely destitute of con- 

 science. 



Impartial survey of things from the outside in 

 a spirit of detachment might suggest a disturbing 

 doubt whether the modern state whose eagerly 

 pursued ideal is the greed of wealth by unlimited 

 increase of trade and whose jubilation mounts 

 with the mounting figures of trade-increase and 

 population — as if to multiply men and their 

 means of subsistence, however poor, were un- 

 questionable virtue and wisdom — will have the 

 courage to devise and inflict such effective penal- 

 ties on individual and corporate wrongdoings as 

 shall in time breed an answering salutary con- 

 science. In view of the common infirmities of 

 human nature, the subtle tendencies to craft 

 inherent in trade, the pressing temptations to 

 fraud incident to the keen struggles of com- 

 petition, and the inevitable debasement of charac- 

 ter produced by the passionate pursuit of a low 

 money-getting ideal, it is not quite certain that 

 there will be such a resolute search for and stern 

 application of effective remedies as shall suffice 

 to keep sound the health of the commonwealth. 

 The stealthy risk is that the poisonous infiltration 

 of corruption may insensibly vitiate the moral 

 sense of the community, which, while still lauding 

 purity in the general and so keeping up a fair 

 front of virtue, shall then, content with the pleas- 



