And the root of all is poverty and ignorance.

Educate the children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear.

Man is God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism.

Man is the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on, he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what is to come.

Make the circumstances good and the results will be good, for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.
Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism, destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our toil."[23] This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism of our day.