mere legal dependence, without regard to character, or it may signify degradation and mendicancy. Very worthy persons occasionally are compelled to accept public relief, and thus come to be on the lists of paupers.

The point at which dependence is recognized by the community varies with conditions. Climate, stage of culture, local customs of nourishment and dress, class standards, wealth of the prosperous citizens, are factors which enter the problem. Where all are poor, very few can be supported by neighbors, and that only when want touches suffering. Where the climate is warm pauperism is a lighter burden, because the demand for clothing, housing, and food is less pressing. Where the standard of comfort is high, on the contrary, and wealth is diffused, and charity is popular, the signs of misery which elicit help need not be so tragical and sensational, for even discomfort excites pity.

Dependence on the community is determined largely by the stage of social organization. (Under the ancient conditions of slavery and serfdom the laborer was cared for by his owner and the serf by his lord. It is sometimes said, with truth and bitterness, that the capitalist cares for his machines and his horses, but not for his human agents of production, the wage-earners. There is occasional justice in the taunt and complaint. The rich man's stables are frequently finer than the dwellings of his employees. But part of this misery of the poor is an accompaniment of the modern régime of personal freedom; we live under a system of nominal free contracts, and are on the way upward to a condition of entirely free contracts. This new and higher position brings new perils, and the sufferings which attend readjustments. But freedom is an advance on slavery and serfdom, as manhood, with all its cares, is above infancy and youth.

In Scotland, so long as there was a clan organization, a national poor law had but limited value and application. But when the clan dissolved and strangers became citizens, and there was no sense of obligation of relatives to support them, the need of legal provision came to be felt, and the poor law was introduced.

In all parts of the world, from early ages, there has been some social provision for the weak and dependent, if ever so meagre and inadequate. But community responsibility, in the political sense, is a comparatively late phase of civilization. In tribal organization only the members of the tribe feel under obligation to help; but under modern political organization each member of the state is under obligations of law to all others, and the state recognizes the claim of each citizen to protection, help, and support. In a period of transition, the readjustment causes much suffering and loss, as we see among the negroes of the South. The old forms of control and assistance are dead, and the new forms are not yet born. But the higher will come in due time.

All human beings are dependent on parents in infancy, and helplessness is natural to the babe. But the children of selfsupporting families are not wards of the community. In a certain sense, the inhabitants of a modern commonwealth are so related as to need each other far more than men at barbarian levels of culture. Increased unlikeness of parts implies great dependence of parts. The savage makes all the coarse articles his few and simple wants require, but the civilized artisan makes one article, and looks to all the world for the other objects of satisfaction. Not all the poor are dependents, and poverty is a merely relative matter. A poor Irishman would be counted rich in Patagonia. Dependence admits degrees and shades off upward into simple misfortune and downward into abject beggary or crime. In its extreme form we have pauperism, a word which carries with it a suggestion of weakness, inferiority, and reproach. The typical "pauper" is a social parasite, who attaches himself to others, and, by living at their expense, suffers loss of energy and ability by disease and atrophy. Pauperism at this stage is a loathsome moral disease, more difficult to cure than crime.

There is solidarity, organic connection, between dependents and delinquents. They cannot be studied or treated as if they belonged in compartments separated by impervious walls. Very

often a single family will impose on society the burden of illborn and badly trained children, who will be dispersed in later years among dependents, defectives, and delinquents. The most feeble members will drift into asylums for incurables; the women will recruit the army of outcasts; the men will swell the ranks of vagabonds and thieves. Those who reach old age will hide in the shelter of the county poorhouse.

CHAPTER II.

THE EVOLUTION OF INFERIOR AND ANTISOCIAL ELEMENTS.

DEFECT is an incident of evolution. Assuming, at least hypothetically, that all life is continuous in one system of related beings, we may reason from the phenomena of plant and animal life to the life of human beings, so far as they have vital qualities in common. Having to account for inherited and acquired defect in the physical and psychical natures of men, we may learn much to the purpose from a study of injury, defective nutrition, transmission of qualities, variation and selection in the science of biology. The biologist prepares part of the data for sociology. We may make painless experiments with all kinds of plants and animals to discover the effects of changes in light, temperature, position, chemical reactions, electricity, and food on the individual in its development from the germ. The general laws of heredity and nurture move upward through all strata of living creatures to the highest. Even where a degree of pain is necessarily inflicted, if the experiments are regulated by intelligence and humanity, the results justify the cost, since not only men, but also lower animals, share in the advantages of advancing science. The veterinary surgeon is as dependent on the revelations of vivisection as the family physician and teacher. Hundreds of thousands of horses, cattle, and pets are saved from pain and disease in consequence of the vicarious sufferings endured by a few sentient creatures in the laboratories of competent experimenters. There is no excuse for tyros and bunglers who hack at random, without guidance or purpose, into quivering flesh. It is in the laboratory that we discover the conditions which cause arrested development of the central nervous system,

deformity, disease, and the ways of transmitting characters to posterity. Comte has shown how closely biology and sociology are related in this enterprise.

"But we saw, in our survey of biology, that pathological cases are the true scientific equivalents of pure experimentation. The same reasons apply, with even more force, to sociological researches. In them, pathological analysis consists in the examination of cases, unhappily too common, in which the natural laws, either of harmony or succession, are disturbed by any causes, special or general, accidental or transient. These disturbances are, in the social body, exactly analogous to diseases in the individual organism. In both cases it is a noble use of our reason to discover the real laws of our nature, individual or social, by the analysis of its sufferings."

But

The range of experiment is much wider than is sometimes represented. It might be possible to determine something of the relative importance of heredity and culture by studying a series of infants whose parentage is known to be defective, but who have been transplanted to good family surroundings. it is very difficult to follow such adopted children, because it is ordinarily best for all parties to hide the past and give the child the advantage of the new start and name. And furthermore, defective children owe part of their inferiority to early influence as well as to inherited qualities.

Galton and others have studied a large number of successful and of inferior individuals with a view to discovering the causes which led to their marked characteristics. Here, again, it is extremely difficult to isolate the causes and to determine which are most significant.

Dugdale and McCulloch followed down the line of degraded families, in all their intermarriages, for several generations, and sought to define the part played by heredity and education. Even here the results are confused.

But when we turn to the studies of biologists the conditions are far more favorable to definite conclusions, because they have before them all the field of plant and animal life; they can vary conditions at will; and they can submit each object to experi