forbid! I am merely stating a fact. When we examine into the
ultimate cause of a dangerous class; into the one property common
to all its members, whether thieves, beggars, profligates, or the
merely pauperised--we find it to be this loss of self-respect. As
long as that remains, poor souls may struggle on heroically, pure
amid penury, filth, degradation unspeakable. But when self-
respect is lost, they are lost with it. And whatever may be the
fate of virtuous parents, children brought up in dens of physical
and moral filth cannot retrieve self-respect. They sink, they
must sink, into a life on a level with the sights, sounds, aye,
the very smells, which surround them. It is not merely that the
child's mind is contaminated, by seeing and hearing, in
overcrowded houses, what he should not hear and see: but the
whole physical circumstances of his life are destructive of self-
respect. He has no means for washing himself properly: but he
has enough of the innate sense of beauty and fitness to feel that
he ought not to be dirty; he thinks that others despise him for
being dirty, and he half despises himself for being so. In all
raged schools and reformatories, so they tell me, the first step
toward restoring self-respect is to make the poor fellows clean.
From that moment they begin to look on themselves as new men--with
a new start, new hopes, new duties. For not without the deepest
physical as well as moral meaning, was baptism chosen by the old
Easterns, and adopted by our Lord Jesus Christ, as the sign of a
new life; and outward purity made the token and symbol of that
inward purity which is the parent of self-respect, and manliness,
and a clear conscience; of the free forehead, and the eye which
meets boldly and honestly the eye of its fellow-man.

But would that mere physical dirt were all that the lad has to