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pality; in American cities it must at first be taken by the Charity Organization Society or some kindred association.

4. A social policy relating to the Dependent Group must include an extension of experiments with positive social selection. Each year competent thinkers come nearer to agreement on this principle, although it is not so clear that we have yet hit upon the most effective devices in its application. It is more than formerly assumed that persons who cannot improve, or at least will not degrade, the physical and psychical average of the race, should be prevented, so far as possible, from propagating their kind. Accidental and sporadic deflections downward from the average would still occur; but one of the principal causes of race-deterioration would cease at the source.

The device of extermination by painless death has not been seriously discussed among the competent.

The device of sterilization has been frequently suggested, and, in a few instances, chiefly on the ground of advantage to the individual, it has been employed. There is nothing absurd, cruel, or impracticable in this proposition, although it would be helpful only within a limited area at best, and would not make segregation unnecessary, since even a sterilized degenerate can do injury by example and actions. It could be useful only upon the recommendation of a medical administrator and in the case of persons isolated from social contacts.

A beginning has been made with the device of the custodial colony for segregation, already in quite general use with the insane, the feeble-minded, the epileptic. The idea is not absolutely new, but the scientific grounds and economic methods have not yet been worked out in a way to frame a cogent argument and appeal to electors and legislators. We must still interpret the partial and tentative experiments already made so as to throw light on extended applications of the principle. Until the entire community, or at least the governing majority, has accepted this policy with open eyes and united will, we must expect to pay the heavy costs of neglect.

Conviction of the importance of a rational and humane policy of social selection has been diluted, and aggressive effort has been

delayed, by certain widely accepted errors. Thus we have a large number of citizens who cling to the belief that "natural selection" is adequate and preferable. They speak of the "evanescence of evil;" they cite the high rate of mortality of starved and sickly infants; the sterility of prostitutes; the frequent celibacy of vicious and criminal men; the disappearance of degenerate families; the ravages of alcoholism and disease among the neurotic and inefficient. Doubtless, as was long ago abundantly illustrated by Malthus, misery, pain, weakness, vice, do tend to extinction without any conscious, concerted, and rational effort of the community through law. Why not leave the weeding-out process to these destructive agents and forces?

False modesty has been an important factor in hindering the calm and reasonable discussion of the selective process. Ignorance of biological science has contributed to the obstacles in the way of progress. We need to consider what the waiting, laissezfaire policy involves in order to understand why a humane society will not always stand by without a positive effort to modify the process and reduce its cost. It would mean, first of all, that hundreds of thousands of our fellow-men who fail in competition would starve or freeze before our eyes in our streets. Among these would be innumerable innocent little children, and helpless old men and women, unfortunate and crippled veterans of the army of labor. We do not need to depend on imagination for a knowledge of the effect of such conduct. It is what Bill Sykes did, what miserly stepfathers and heartless tyrants have done. The king who heard that his subjects had nothing to eat, and sent word that they were welcome to eat grass, was inviting a revolution—and it came. Hunger breeds despair, and those who are left on the verge of starvation have nothing to risk when they steal and rob, or set the torch to palaces, and rob public stores and granaries in the glare of conflagrations.

The instinct of sympathy is too deep and general to permit neglect. The moral obligation of charity is now with us organic, institutional, and fortified by ethical philosophy. While we cannot "prove" it, as we can a physical cause of disease, we can show to all who are capable of appreciating the argument that charity

is an essential factor in a rational view of life and the universe. In spite of the powerful and influential protest of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the civilized nations have gone on their way of extending the positive agencies of benevolence. The let-alone policy is impracticable. Evidence is accumulating to prove that charitable support without a positive general policy of segregation and custody is, in the case of those who are seriously defective, the certain cause of actually increasing misery by insuring the propagation of the miserable. We cannot go backward to mere natural selection, the process which was suitable with vegetable and animal life, and inevitable in the stages of early human culture. Nor can we rest with merely mitigating methods of relief. We are compelled to consider devices for direct elimination of the heredity of pauperism and grave defect.

Fortunately we have already discovered that an effective colony method is technically and economically possible, humane, and financially advisable. For example, it is not difficult to estimate the average cost per year for the support of a feeble-minded woman of child-bearing age in a farm colony where all the inhabitants work, learn, play, but none breed. If she were free to roam, the county or state would have during these same years c support the woman and her defective illegitimate children. The future generations of "the Jukes family" are in sight, and the burdens they will bring. We know the effects of these two policies; they" spring to the eyes." The method of segregation, as a device of negative social selection, is already at work and its results are before us. Gradually, tentatively, carefully, the method will be employed with others, as they are found to be manifestly unfit for the function of propagation and education of offspring from the insane and feeble-minded society will proceed to place in permanent custody the incurable inebriate, the professional criminal, the hopelessly depraved. The marriage of consumptives, and of others with feeble constitutions, will be increasingly diminished under pressure of enlightened public opinion.

But the policy of segregation is applicable only within rigid limitations. Only those members can be cut off from family life and social freedom who are manifestly unfit for parenthood and

for contact with fellow-citizens in competitive industry. Many of the children of criminals may be so nourished and taught in a new domestic environment as to become valuable citizens. But society cannot afford to play the nurse and teacher for a very large horde of incapables and criminals. The cost would be too great and the sacrifice would fall on the wrong parties. It is in the improvements and reforms which promise the elevation of the group not yet either pauper or criminal that we may most reasonably hope to secure the best returns for our efforts. Something may be done to compel parents now negligent to perform their duties as parents and make better use of their wasted resources. The extension of probation work to parents, already begun in some of our juvenile courts, is a hint of what may be done.

5. Not even a brief outline of a social policy relating to the Dependent Group can omit reference to the agencies of "preventive and constructive" philanthropy. Omitting details, yet bearing in mind the impressive array of inventions in this line, let us seek to define the essential regulative principles which at once inspire and direct these methods.

Pauperism is, in great part, the effect of known and removable causes. These causes are not obscure, concealed, or beyond our grasp. They are consequences of human choices which may be reversed. The reception of alms, even in cases of innocent misfortune, is a social injury; it lowers self-respect, weakens energy, produces humiliation and mental suffering, diminishes productive efficiency, tends to the increase of pauperism. Hence those who know most of relief are most desirous of reducing the necessity for it to the lowest possible terms.

The National Consumers' League and the recently organized National Child Labor Committee represent a policy of prevention which is full of promise. It is perfectly clear to all competent observers, who are not blinded by some false conceptions of personal financial interest, that the vitality, industrial efficiency, fitness for parenthood, and intelligent social co-operation of the rising generation are profoundly affected by neglect of the children of the poor. In order to prevent juvenile pauperism and youthful vice and crime, the entire nation must work steadily to

introduce and make operative something like the following program of legislation and administration: 11

All children must complete the first eight years of the common school curriculum and attain a certain standard of education before they are permitted to engage in bread-winning occupations, and none under sixteen years should be wage-workers unless this standard has been reached.

All children, when they begin work, should be examined by a public physician, and held back from intense labor if in weight, stature, and development of muscles and nerves they are dwarfed. Physicians and nurses should be charged with the duty of seeing that school children are kept in good health.

All defective, deaf, and subnormal children, as well as the crippled, should have proper separate and special instruction.

Boards of education should provide playgrounds and vacation schools, under careful supervision, in order to prevent the evils of idleness, misdirected energy, and vicious associations.

Public libraries should extend their branch work, not only to different districts of the city, but, by means of home library agencies, into the very homes of the poor; and the easy and pleasant use of the English language should thus be promoted.

The street occupations of boys should be carefully regulated and supervised, and the employment of girls in public ways should be prohibited.

Boys under the age of sixteen years should not be permitted to labor in mines or with dangerous machinery.

If parents and other adults are in any way responsible for the delinquency of children, they should be held penally responsible.

At the same time, the curriculum of the schools should be so planned as to lead by a natural transition from the play and study of childhood to the specialized industries of maturity, by means of evening schools, technical instruction for apprentices, regulation of hours and shifts, so that youth may lay a broad foundation for the specialization of the factory and mill.

Among the methods of preventive philanthropy is that of new

"Suggested by the paper of MRS. FLORENCE KELLEY, published in this number of the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY.

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