Excerpt from The Moral Function of the State: A Paper Read Before the Oxford Branch of the Guild of St. Matthew, on May 17th, 1887 God probably took too little account Of the modifiable human agencies through which individuals are influenced for good and for evil. There are heroic souls that even in the most adverse surroundings keep on struggling towards noble ideals - they are the salt Of the earth; but most human beings are not heroic. The society in which we live, by its organization and the Opinions to which that organization gives rise, produces its regular crop Of narrow minded respectable persons rooted to existing institutions, Of wealthy idlers wasting their own lives and the lives Of others, Of weary toilers dulled into apathy by drudgery or liable to be thrown out Of work by the caprices Of the labour-market, Of helpless women driven by starvation and social pressure to sell themselves for a living, Of drunkards, thieves, swindlers and other habitual criminals, transmit ting their evil tendencies to coming generations. And for all this we are responsible as a community. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.