differences of moral and industrial character determine what particular individuals shall succeed or fail in the fight for work and wages.  It by no means follows that if by education we could improve all these moral and industrial weaklings they could obtain steady employment without displacing others.  Where an over-supply of labour exists, no remedy which does not operate either by restricting the supply or increasing the demand for labour can be effectual.

Sec. 3.  Civilization ascends from Material to Moral.—­The life of the poorest and most degraded classes is impenetrable to the highest influences of civilization.  So long as the bare struggle for continuance of physical existence absorbs all their energies, they cannot be civilized.  The consideration of the greater intrinsic worth of the moral life than the merely physical life, must not be allowed to mislead us.  That which has the precedence in value has not the precedence in time.  We must begin with the lower life before we can ascend to the higher.  As in the individual the corpus sanum is rightly an object of earlier solicitude in education than the mens sana, though the latter may be of higher importance; so with the progress of a class.  We cannot go to the lowest of our slum population and teach them to be clean, thrifty, industrious, steady, moral, intellectual, and religious, until we have first taught them how to secure for themselves the industrial conditions of healthy physical life.  Our poorest classes have neither the time, the energy, or the desire to be clean, thrifty, intellectual, moral, or religious.  In our haste we forget that there is a proper and necessary order in the awakening of desires.  At present our “slum” population do not desire to be moral and intellectual, or even to be particularly clean.  Therefore these higher goods must wait, so far as they are dependent on the voluntary action of the poor.  What these people do want is better food, and more of it; warmer clothes; better and surer shelter; and greater security of permanent employment on decent wages.  Until we can assist them to gratify these “lower” desires, we shall try in vain to awaken “higher” ones.  We must prepare the soil of a healthy physical existence before we can hope to sow the moral seed so as to bring forth fruit.  Upon a sound physical foundation alone can we build a high moral and spiritual civilization.

Moral and sanitary reformers have their proper sphere of action among those portions of the working classes who have climbed the first rounds in the ladder of civilization, and stand on tolerably firm conditions of material comfort and security.  They cannot hope at present to achieve any great success among the poorest workers.  The fact must not be shirked that in preaching thrift, hygiene, morality, and religion to the dwellers in the courts and alleys of our great cities, we are sowing seed upon a barren ground.  Certain isolated cases of success must not blind us