How is such a boy to make an effort?  His work wearies and puzzles him—­it does not seem to lead him anywhere; he has no gift for games; he is neither amusing nor attractive; he gets no credit for anything, and indeed he deserves none; he ought really to be in a kind of moral sanatorium, guarded, guided, encouraged by wise and faithful and compassionate pastors.  The worst feature of school life is that if it fortifies characters with some vigour about them, it implies that others must inevitably go under and be turned out moral and mental failures.  It is the way of the world, says the philosopher, rough justice!  It may be justice, but it is certainly rough; and I look forward to the time when we educators of the present generation will be considered incredibly hard-hearted, unconscientious, immoral, for acquiescing so contentedly in the ruthless sacrifice of the weak to the culture of the strong.

Ought we then, it may be asked, to decide that if people are incapable of sustained effort, no effort is to be expected of them?  Are we to decline upon a genial determinism, and to sweep away all belief in moral responsibility?  No! because even if we are determinists, we have to take into account the fact that society does for some reason advance.  When we consider the fact that the rightness of humanitarian principles, of anti-slavery movements, of popular education, of Factory Acts, of public hospitals is universally admitted; when we compare the current principles of the nineteenth-century man with the current principles, say, of the fourteenth-century man, it is plain that there has been a remarkable rise of the moral temperature, and that our optimistic view of progress is a rational one.

The ordinary person is to-day quite as strongly convinced of the rights of other men as he is of their duties; and thus the determinist is bound to confess that there is an ameliorating and humanising principle at work, if not in the world at large, at least in the Western races.  It is inconsistent to acquiesce in faulty practice and not to acquiesce in the growth of ideals, even though one may believe that the advance is due to some external cause and is not self-developed.  If performance is always more or less straining after the ideal, the determinist is justified in expecting a higher standard of performance, and his fatalism may take the direction of removing the obstacles to further improvement.  But in dealing with individuals the moralist does well to temper his hopes with a wise determinism, and not to be too much cast down if one to whom he has made clear the disastrous effects of yielding to temptation cannot at once harmonise his purpose and his practice.  If it were true, as too many preachers take for granted, that we have all, whatever our difference of physical and mental equipment, an equal sense of moral responsibility, the result would be to plunge us into hopeless pessimism.  The question is whether the moralist is justified