What knowledge? Knowledge of human nature and of the essentials to a happy and wholesome life.
It is bad for men to be rich and idle; it is bad for men to be ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-taught, unhonoured, and unloved.
Whilst life is a sordid scramble, in which the prizes are pernicious wealth, and luxury, and idleness, and in which the blanks are hunger, ignorance, vice, unhappiness, the prison, and the gallows; immorality and crime must flourish as pestilence flourishes in a filthy, pent, and insanitary city. It is sad to see the custodians of the public morality bewailing the wickedness of men, and fostering the evil surroundings from which evil springs. It is as foolish as to bewail the presence of malarial fever, to punish the victims for spreading the disease, and at the same time to refuse to drain the marsh from which the malaria comes, because it is the property of a grand duke, who wishes to shoot wildfowl there.
What do I propose should be done. Why that, my friends, is another story. What I propose at present to do is to prove that crime and immorality are caused: to show what the causes are; and to point out that the recognised remedies are ineffectual.
While we have an idle rich, and a hungry and ignorant poor, we cannot get rid of vice and crime. To punish the criminals we have made, is unjust and useless; to pray for deliverance from plague: we must look to the drains—we must improve the environment.
No man should be idle. No man should be rich. No man should be ignorant, no man destitute. Every man should have a chance to earn the essentials to a wholesome, happy, temperate, and useful life. Every child should be nourished, and taught, and trained.
Crime, vice, disease, poverty, idleness: all these are preventable evils.
But we cannot drain our marshes, because, little as we heed the misery of the people, the ignorance and hunger of the children, the despair of the men and the degradation of the women, we are marvellously tender of Grand Ducal sport.
It is Mammon we worship, not God; it is property we prize, not life; it is vanity we love, and not our fellow-creatures. We are an ignorant, atavistic people; and our priests are wondrous moral.