the patience to effect a cure, to keep to the resolve, or prevent it
from fading out of sight. For a _vast_ proportion of all minor sins,
or those within the law, there is no cure sought. The offender says
and believes, "It is too strong for me"--and yet these small
unpunished offenses cause a thousand times more suffering than all the
great crimes.

Within a generation, owing to the great increase of population,
prosperity and personal comfort, nervous susceptibility has also
gained in extent, but there has been no check to petty abuse of power,
selfishness, which always comes out in some form of injustice or
wrong, or similar vexations. Nay, what with the disproportionate
growth of vulgar wealth, this element has rapidly increased, and it
would really seem as if the plague must spread _ad infinitum_, unless
some means can be found to _invogliare_ and inspire the offenders with
a sense of their sins, and move them to reform. And it is more than
probable that if all who are at heart sincerely willing to reform
their morals and manners could be brought to keep their delinquencies
before their consciousness in the very simple manner which I have
indicated, the fashion or _mode_ might at least be inaugurated. For it
is _not_ so much a moral conviction, or an appeal to common sense,
which is needed (as writers on ethics all seem to think), but some
practical art of keeping men up to the mark in endeavoring to reform,
or to make them remember it all day long, since "out of sight out of
mind" is the devil's greatest help with weak minds.



CHAPTER VI.