Another danger for the working class is the influence that poor living conditions exert on the health and lifespan of people. Initially, this is a consequence of poor diet, bad air, and a miserable way of life. But diet, air, and housing are not the only things that determine the physical well-being of human beings; rather, another component exercises a far greater influence, namely the chaste morals of a people. This disseminates its physical influence down to the most recent generations. If we come across a people whose diet is barely sufficient but whose health is flourishing, then the primary reason is chaste, pure morals. If dissoluteness and immorality are added to poor diet, to unhealthy air in miserable housing, then a people is on its way to utmost ruin. Over the long run, the most noble tribe of people cannot withstand the combination of these factors. Herein lies the main reason for the profound debasement of the slaves in ancient heathen times, and the crude morality of these poor people was a major reason for their masters to treat them like animals. It is completely unfounded to assume that any people is protected from such conditions by its nature, and this view fundamentally rests (once again) on the heathen notion that nature itself distinguishes human beings [from one another], intending some for prosperity and higher spiritual culture, but others for slavery and an animal existence. Together, poverty and dissoluteness can reproduce the most debased conditions of heathendom; numerous examples of this can be found in every one of Europe’s major cities. But these factors, which ruin human beings, would make their impact felt to the highest extent throughout the more impoverished part of the working class if the prospect of destroying family and marriage for the worker should succeed. As a result of other economic principles, a major portion of the working class has already been pushed down to the lowest level of life's barest necessities; but by dissolving the Christian family, the murderous poison of sexual indecency, with all of its atrocious effects, would be poured into the heart [of the working class]. There is, as we can see every day, such an impure spirit abroad in the world. How many newspapers serve this spirit, naturally to the extent appropriate for a people that is still essentially Christian. Demoralizing pleasures are daily offered the people, yes, and in the organs of the liberal party they are even extolled before the people as the highest and truest of life’s pleasures. The stories they convey are frequently
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