lessen in number. Out of slums and back courts and alleys, out of filth and overcrowding, out of misery which maddens and destitution which destroys, up into the sunshine and the pure air, into healthy homes and bright surroundings, must come these weary victims of inhuman conditions. Crime is the fungus, growing on ordure in the darkness; it will die when its foul bed is swept away, and when sun light illumines the darkened depths.
V.
The responsibility of the individual to Society for sin is a question surrounded by the greatest difficulties and perplexities. Many acts regarded as crimes when the race had had a briefer experience than its present one are now by some regarded only as sins, and by others even as acts useful to Society. The crime of blasphemy may serve as an apposite example. Blasphemy in the semi-barbaric stage is always stamped as a crime, and it remains still a crime among ourselves; but large numbers of people now regard it as a sin, which may be condemned by public opinion but ought not to be punishable by law; while others, again, consider that the free ventilation of every opinion is beneficial to the community, and favors, in the long run, the triumph of truth.
This change in moral judgment, due to growth, to evolution of thought, is continually giving rise to conflict between the individual and Society. A man in advance of the thought of his time comes into conflict with it, just as does a man who is behind it. The criminal and the heretic have often been found in the same gaol, from the one being an unevolved savage, and the other being too highly evolved for his surroundings. Galileo to-day is honored and admired; he was a criminal in the seventeenth century. Many to-day hold views for which they are punished, but their views will be truisms in the twentieth century. All that the individual can do, in cases in which his own moral judgment conflicts with the moral judgment of the community to which he belongs, is to test his opinion by the calmest and most unbiassed reasoning of which he is capable; this is due from him as an individual to Society; once convinced that
