The demoralizing quality of such stuff as 'The Straight Road,' which is forced upon us with increasing pertinacity, is its denial of kindness, its evading of obligation. Temptation is not only the occasion, but the justifier of sin,--a point of view which plays havoc with our common standard of morality. When a vicious young millionaire like Harry Thaw runs amuck through his crude and evil environment, we sigh and say, 'His money ruined him.' When a poor young woman abandons her weary frugalities for the questionable pleasures of prostitution, we sigh and say, 'Her poverty drove her to it.' Where then does goodness dwell? What part does honor play? The Sieur de Joinville, in his memoirs of Saint Louis, tells us that a certain man, sore beset by the pressure of temptation, sought counsel from the Bishop of Paris, 'whose Christian name was William.' And this wise William of Paris said to him: 'The castle of Montl'héry stands in the safe heart of France, and no invading hosts assail it. But the castle of La Rochelle in Poitou stands on the line of battle. Day and night it must be guarded from assault, and it has suffered grievously. Which gentleman, think you, the King holds high in favor, the governor of Montl'héry, or the governor of La Rochelle? The post of danger is the post of glory, and he who is sorely wounded in the combat is honored by God and man.'
There are those whose ardor for humanity finds a congenial vent in the denouncement of all they see about them,--all the institutions of their country, all the laborious processes of civilization. Sociologists of this type speak and write of an ordinary American city in terms which Dante might have envied. Nobody, it would seem, is ever cured in its hospitals; they only lie on 'cots of pain.' Nobody is ever reformed in its reformatories. Nobody is reared to decency in its asylums. Nobody is--apparently--educated in its schools. Its industries are ravenous beasts, sucking the blood of workers; its poor are 'shackled slaves'; its humble homes are 'dens.' I have heard a philanthropic lecturer talk to the poor upon the housing of the poor. She threw on a screen enlarged photographs of narrow streets and tenement rooms which looked to me unspeakably dreary, but which the working-women around me gazed at in mild perplexity, seeing nothing amiss, and wondering that their residences should be held up to this unseemly scorn. They did not do as did the angry Italians of a New Jersey town,--smash the invidious pictures which shamed their homes; they sat in stolid silence and discomfiture, dimly conscious of an unresented insult.