But then all innocent persons connected with bad men are fated to suffer in exact proportion to the closeness of the connection, whether the bad men are destroyed or not. Weak, selfish, perverted, and criminal men always inflict misery upon their relatives and associates. This is not usually intensified by their being drunkards or debauchees.

It is also true that no one of Nature’s methods of extinction is pleasant [{52}] to those connected with the victim. The thief or thug, prematurely dying with delirium tremens, is certainly quite as bearable a sight to those before whose eyes it may come as the spectacle of a virtuous man, the sole support of his family, slowly wasting away with consumption in spite of all that loving service and agonizing sympathy can do to retain for him a life that is of so much value.

TO the next objection that the practice of vice is not invariably suicidal, since many rascals live to attain as [{53}] green an old age as the most righteous, it is sufficient to say that plentiful as these exceptions may occasionally seem, their proportion to the whole number is at least as small as that of the exceptions to any other general law of biology.

The policeman on the next corner will bear decided testimony that the number of scoundrels who survive their 30th year is astonishingly small, and he can point out any number of erstwhile troublesome members of the community who are ending their lives in penitentiary, poorhouse, or hospital at an age when well-behaved men are [{54}] just entering upon the serious business of life.

It is also demonstrable that the proportion of vicious men to the whole population is much less to-day than at any previous period in the history of the race. This shows conclusively the improvement of society by the self-destructiveness of vice. The proportion of bad men is rapidly diminishing, because bad men die sooner and propagate fewer than good ones. [{55}]

SCIENCE is incredulous of any relation between religion and natural laws. Yet it is true now as said thirty centuries ago that—

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
A good understanding have they who keep his commandments.”

From the Ten Commandments on, all religions have been the best efforts of their founders and supporters to put man in accord with his environment. This is their essence, though too frequently obscured by the political, theological, and social aspects given them.