The Vicious by Inheritance––Who are these whom General Booth cheerfully undertakes to fashion and make amenable to the conditions of godly and righteous and sober living? Let us hear the life history of many of them in his own words:––
’The rakings of the human cesspool.’
‘Little ones, whose parents are habitually drunk.
. . . Whose ideas of merriment are gained from the familiar spectacle of the nightly debauch.’
‘The obscenity of the talk of many of the children of some of our public schools could hardly be outdone even in Sodom and Gomorrah.’
And the childhood––save the word!––of the children of today reproduces the childhood of their parents, their grandparents, who knows? their great grand parents. These are, no doubt, the worst; but the worst must be reckoned with first, for if these slip through the meshes of the remedial net, the masses more inert than vicious slide out through the breaks. In the first place, then, the scheme embraces the vicious by inheritance; proposes to mix up with the rest a class whose sole heritage is an inconceivable and incalculable accumulation of vicious inclinations and propensities. And this, in the face of that conception of heredity which is quietly taking possession of the public mind, and causing many thoughtful parents to abstain from very active efforts to mould the characters of their children.
Those of us whose attention has been fixed upon the working of the law of heredity until it appears to us to run its course, unmodified and unlimited by other laws, may well be pardoned for regarding with doubtful eye a scheme which has, for its very first condition, the regeneration of the vicious; of the Vicious by inherited propensity.
THE LAW AGAINST US––HABIT.