their wonderful adaptation, in structure and function, to the needs imposed by their environment. With us men, it is not so. Everywhere about us, we find the misshapen or otherwise physically defective. Sadder still is the aspect of human intelligence. Thousands of men are helpless idiots; in larger numbers are those who, beginning life with fair promises, sink, sooner or later, into the pitiable condition of insanity; while more numerous still are the imbecile or weak-minded. The capacity of the average so-called normal mind is very small, while the finest and strongest intelligences are so tinctured with unreasonable sentiment and ill-regulated desires, as to mar alike their usefulness to their fellows and their own happiness.'

We esteem ourselves the most highly favored of all animals-why should we fare the most sadly ? A reasonable answer to the question appears not difficult. It would seem that our unfortunate condition is not a natural necessity but the result of our

1 The general level of human intelligence is so low that in the most civilized lands, according to Galton's estimate, only one man in about four thousand is so endowed as to become "eminent," or generally recognized by the world at large as of conspicuous ability. Of the men whom he would designate as "illustrious "-those whose ability shall still be recognized in remote future ages-there are but one in a million.—Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius, pp. 9, 10. London, 1892. When a family begins to rise, in point of intelligence, above the low general level about it, it soon falls back, through the mating of its members with individuals from the surrounding mediocrity. Occasionally mental ability continues to increase for three generations, but it then almost invariably stops, begins to decline, and after three generations more has sunk to its former level.-Otto Ammon, Die natürliche Auslese beim Menschen, p. 56. Jena, 1893.

interference to an unwise degree with the ordinary course of nature, a penalty for the misuse of our intelligence.

There can be no well-being for an organism but through its nice adaptation to its environment. Such an adaptation we had, doubtless, in the remote past, but we have it no longer. For the lower animals, nature has secured adaptation through selection: the fittest have survived, and these, at each successive stage, have come very near to the perfection then possible. For our earliest ancestors we must believe that nature made similar provision. But as men rose to a higher level of intelligence and united into societies, they began to make for themselves an artificial environment, which grew ever more complex, more many-sided. The valuable principle of coöperation was gradually introduced, but not always applied wisely; and through its misuse the salutary working of natural selection was often, in great measure, set at defiance. When a man, although ill-adapted to the natural environment, presented a fairly adequate adjustment to certain of the many sides of that which was artificial, society often came to his support, paid for him as it were his natural debts, secured his survival, and favored the continuance of his kind. But the sanction thus purchased for many an unworthy life has often proved a curse both for the race and the individual.

Many persons see in the present fermentation of civilized society the signs of approaching disintegration. Society, they say, is an organism which, like

all others, has its stages of infancy, youth, maturity, old age, and final dissolution, and we now, as a people, find ourselves in the stage of senile decay. This view seems to have support in the history of earlier civilizations, as of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome; but that such a fate is inevitable may well be questioned. It has been contended, of late years, by Weismann' that the lowest of animals, the protozoa, are potentially immortal; that they have no inherent tendency toward natural death, but that if unmolested by extrinsic or accidental agents of destruction they will live forever. That in this matter Weismann is right, appears very probable. In like manner, as we may believe, a social organism may be potentially immortal; but it must be adequately self-regulative. It must have the intelligence to recognize, and the courage to prune away, all the outgrowths which are very weak or morbid. Had the great empires of antiquity possessed this enlightenment, it is probable that they would not have perished.

During long ages, the very weak of human kind have been generally left to shift for themselves, while the very vicious have been met by the most cruel attempts at repression. Toward the close of the last century, a kindlier policy began to dawn, and a more humane spirit was infused into our dealings with defectives and criminals. But not yet has philanthropy grasped a conception of the true cause of human evil, nor laid the axe at its root. Indeed,

1 Prof. August Weismann, Ueber die Dauer des Lebens, p. 33 et seq. Jena, 1882.

of late years, the humanitarian current has set so strongly toward sentimentalism as to endanger not only human progress but the very existence of society. In these days, the hopelessly weak are received as a special charge from Heaven and, to the sad detriment of their more promising brothers, a double portion of wealth and affection is lavished upon them; while of the criminal it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he is regarded as a being whom society must reform, though ninety-and-nine just persons thereby severely suffer.

As wealth and knowledge increase in our civilized communities, the sentimentalist becomes better equipped for the purposes of his mischievous philanthropy, and unwittingly adapts as subtile instruments of destruction those means by which civilization should gradually be perfected. A marked instance of such a tendency was recently supplied by one of our reformatory prisons for women. It was proposed to provide this institution with an "incubator" a very modern life-saving device-in order that the prematurely born children of the criminal inmates might be wrested from that beneficent extinction planned for them by judicious and kindly Nature. Not only are the offspring of such women grossly tainted, as a rule, through their vicious parentage, but their premature birth has added thereto a vital enfeeblement which, alone, would usually handicap them in the race of life. Such a strenuous effort to conserve and multiply the defectives who curse our race appears not only unnecessary but inhuman. Fortunately, in the case

mentioned, the injudicious proposition did not meet with general approval among the managers of the institution, and was abandoned. By our undue fostering of the weak, not only are the strong injured, but we aggravate the burden to be borne by our posterity; and through our indiscriminate efforts toward reclaiming the criminal, we waste our strength upon individuals who, by their very nature, are insusceptible of reform. Says Herbert Spencer: "There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals. To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a larger host of enemies."

It was said, a few years ago, by a man justly eminent and widely beloved: "What is the prisoner in his cell? A man, just the same as you or I. What man has been, what man intrinsically is, he may be." Here is the false premiss upon which rests much of the unfortunate reasoning and disastrous practice of the sentimental philanthropist. The prisoner is but seldom " a man just the same as you or I." The habitual criminal is not at all the kind of being of whom we think when we talk of, and plan for, the spread of liberty, equality, and fraternity; in his very essence, he is unchangeably incompatible with such privileges and with all higher life. Through the selfishness of his motives, and his feeble self-control, he is a creature whom we cannot admit to coöperation with us, one whom we must ever mistrust and fear.