light and free air.  The same astounding work goes on among the beings who are so haughty in their assumption of the post of creation’s lords.  The healthy child born of healthy parents grows up amid pure air and pure surroundings; his tissues are nourished by strength-giving food, he lives according to sane rules, and he becomes round-limbed, full-chested, and vigorous.  The poor little victim who first sees the light in the Borough or Shadwell, or in the noxious alleys of our reeking industrial towns, receives foul air, mere atmospheric garbage, into his lungs; he becomes thin-blooded, his unwholesome pallor witnesses to his weakness of vitality, his muscles are atrophied, and even his hair is ragged, lustreless, ill-nurtured.  In time he transmits his feebleness to his successors; and we have the creatures who stock our workhouses, hospitals, and our gaols—­for moral degradation always accompanies radical degradation of the physique.

So, if we study the larger aspects of society, we find that in all grades we have large numbers of individuals who fall out of the line that is steadfastly progressing, and become stragglers, camp-followers—­anything you will.  Let a cool and an unsentimental observer bend himself to the study of degraded human types, and he will learn things that will sicken his heart if he is weak, and strengthen him in his resolve to work gallantly during his span of life if he is strong.  Has any one ever fairly tried to face the problem of degradation?  Has any one ever learned how it is that a distinct form of mental disease seems to lurk in all sorts of unexpected fastnesses, ready to breathe a numbing and poisonous vapour on those who are not fortified against the moral malaria?  I am not without experience of the fell chances and changes of life; I venture therefore to use some portion of the knowledge that I have gathered in order to help to fortify the weak and make the strong wary.

If you wander on the roads in our country, you are almost sure to meet men whom you instinctively recognize as fallen beings.  What their previous estate in life may have been you cannot tell, but you know that there has been a fall, and that you are looking on a moral wreck.  The types are superficially varied, but an essential sameness, not always visible at first sight, connects them and enables you to class them as you would class the specimens in a gallery of the British Museum.  As you walk along on a lonely highway, you meet a man who carries himself with a kind of jaunty air.  His woeful boots show glimpses of bare feet, his clothes have a bright gloss in places, and they hang untidily; but his coat is buttoned with an attempt at smartness, and his ill-used hat is set on rakishly.  You note that the man wears a moustache, and you learn in some mysterious way that he was once accustomed to be very trim and spruce in person.  When he speaks, you find that you have a hint of a cultivated accent; he sounds the termination “ing” with precision, and