CHAPTER XII
If any young man learning values wants to know the quickest way to study the seamy side of life, to understand the darkest aspects of human nature, and incidentally, to risk the loss of every illusion he ever had, let him become a reporter on an up-to-date New York newspaper. Within six months he will be apt to believe that every man has his price; he will become acquainted with vice, crime, horror, terror, and every kind of human degradation; theft, murder, arson will seem common-places, forgery a very ordinary affair; men and women, it may even seem to him, "go straight," not because of any inherent principle of goodness in them, but because that degree of temptation which constitutes their particular "price" has not yet offered itself.
Passion of every type, abnormal, often incredible, will be his daily study; if he reflects a little he will probably reach the conclusion that either jealousy in some form, or greed for money, lie at the root of every crime that is ever committed. The overwhelming power of these two passions will startle him, at any rate, and his constant association with only one aspect of life, and that the worst and lowest, will probably produce the conviction that, given only the opportunity, everybody is bad. His conception of women may suffer in particular. The experience, contrariwise, may widen his tolerance and deepen his charity; also, it may leave him as it left me, with an ineradicable contempt for those who, born in ease, protected from the temptations due to poverty and misery, so carelessly condemn the weak, the criminal and the outcast.
With bigger experience may come, in time, a better view; equally, it may never come. Proportion is not so easily recovered, for the mind, at an impressionable age,
