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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: amid penury, filth, degradation unspeakable. But when self-
respect is lost, they are lost with it. And whatever may be the
fate of virtuous parents, children brought up in dens of physical
and moral filth cannot retrieve self-respect. They sink, they
must sink, into a life on a level with the sights, sounds, aye,
the very smells, which surround them. It is not merely that the
child's mind is contaminated, by seeing and hearing, in
overcrowded houses, what he should not hear and see: but the
whole physical circumstances of his life are destructive of self-
respect. He has no means for washing himself properly: but he
has enough of the innate sense of beauty and fitness to feel that
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