watching and comparing the histories of many families, indeed, of every
one with whom I have come in contact for now five-and-thirty years, in
town and country, can only fear that their opinion is but too well
founded on fact--that in the great majority of cases, in all classes
whatsoever, the children are not equal to their parents, nor they, again,
to their grandparents of the beginning of the century; and that this
degrading process goes on most surely, and most rapidly, in our large
towns, and in proportion to the antiquity of those towns, and therefore
in proportion to the number of generations during which the degrading
influences have been at work.

This and cognate dangers have been felt more and more deeply, as the
years have rolled on, by students of human society. To ward them off,
theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in France, which
deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for their morality, and, I
fear, still less for their common-sense. For the theorist in his closet
is certain to ignore, as inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia,
certain of those broad facts of human nature which every active parish
priest, medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of his
life.

Society and British human nature are what they have become by the
indirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct the one
than we can change the other. We can no more mend men by theories than
we can by coercion--to which, by the by, almost all these theorists look
longingly as their final hope and mainstay. We must teach men to mend
their own matters, of their own reason, and their own free-will. We must
teach them that they are the arbiters of their own destinies; and, to a
fearfully great degree, of their children's destinies after them. We
must teach them not merely that they ought to be free, but that they are