drunken ruffian; she converses on equal terms with a blackguard
whom no lady could be seen speaking to in the public street: in
short, she behaves as illegally and unbecomingly as possible
under the circumstances. Bill's conscience reacts to this just as
naturally as it does to the old woman's threats. He is placed in
a position of unbearable moral inferiority, and strives by every
means in his power to escape from it, whilst he is still quite
ready to meet the abuse of the old woman by attempting to smash a
mug on her face. And that is the triumphant justification of
Barbara's Christianity as against our system of judicial
punishment and the vindictive villain-thrashings and "poetic
justice" of the romantic stage.

For the credit of literature it must be pointed out that the
situation is only partly novel. Victor Hugo long ago gave us the
epic of the convict and the bishop's candlesticks, of the
Crosstian policeman annihilated by his encounter with the
Christian Valjean. But Bill Walker is not, like Valjean,
romantically changed from a demon into an angel. There are
millions of Bill Walkers in all classes of society to-day; and
the point which I, as a professor of natural psychology, desire
to demonstrate, is that Bill, without any change in his character
whatsoever, will react one way to one sort of treatment and
another way to another.

In proof I might point to the sensational object lesson provided
by our commercial millionaires to-day. They begin as brigands:
merciless, unscrupulous, dealing out ruin and death and slavery
to their competitors and employees, and facing desperately the
worst that their competitors can do to them. The history of the