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So we, in our present stage of civilisation, are partly retarded by natural conditions of environment. We are still decimated by wild beasts, though it takes a microscope to find them, and by still more bloodthirsty vegetables, of similar dimensions. We are still frozen to death, sunstruck, drowned, and shocked by lightning. We fight the phylloxera, the cottony scale, and anopheles; we have to tunnel mountains, irrigate deserts, bridge rivers, and cross seas; our struggle with the environment is still highly educative. But meanwhile our progress is retarded far more by conditions of social pathology—by ignorance, poverty, and crime; and these conditions are no part of our essential environment, but are due to economic errors and superstitions. If we could straighten out our internal difficulties we could get on gaily with the outside ones.

Now, since we can easily see in history how we have at given times suffered from certain popular mistakes, and how on better knowledge we have outgrown those errors and their painful consequences, why is it not reasonable to assume that we may outgrow our present mistakes and superstitions and their painful consequences? Is it not possible that the persistence in society of certain morbid phenomena is due to an equal persistence of certain false ideas? and that the one may be removed by removing the other? So long as we believe in witchcraft, or in the divine right of kings, or in chattel slavery, so long do we act from that belief, and so long is our action injurious.