shown, are greater than many ever suspect. From Rousseau's discourse on the Origin and Grounds of Inequality among Men, down to the writings of Henry George, this condition in society is looked upon as the root of all our social evils. The philosophy of common socialism aims at equality in all things, but fails of realization because men are born unequal in everything. To make out a case against Mr. Darwin and his "partisans," M. Fouillée claims they insist that no deformed or weakly child deserves to survive, but they say, "Woe to the weak!" and "the Spartan method of disposing of feeble children will be that of the perfect sociology." Such an accusation and its utter absurdity deserve hardly passing reproof. Mr. Darwin expressly argues that, if it were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. What Mr. Spencer claims, and what is claimed in behalf of scientific philanthropy, is simply to regulate, by healthy and moral modes, the increase of the improvident on the means of subsistence; and this the true philanthropist will do by teaching the laws of health, by right physical education, and by wise sanitary measures. So insalutary are the conditions of the environment of the poor in the cities, that only by fitting themselves to unfavorable conditions is life worth living. This civic population suffer from zymotic diseases due to overcrowding; their drinking-waters, laden with the germs of parasites and fevers, if they do not beget febrile disorders, generate diseases of the liver and spleen; while goitre and thyroid from limestone waters, and pellagra and ophthalmia show themselves at the first favorable opportunity. Poverty always tends to be sickly, because it is continually exposed to the attacks of unhealthy influences. The surroundings during confinement exercise a potent influence upon fœtal nutrition. The Greeks were solicitous in having the female surrounded by symmetrical works of art, but in the upper rooms of the tenement there is no place for the Lares and Penates.
Philanthropy does not have to deal alone with poverty and improvidence and its attendant evils. To be born rich and feeble is as bad a fate as to be born poor and capable. There is a kind of material success which, when it destroys men's finer moral and intellectual faculties, is a greater curse than the worst kind of hardship. "The chief advantage of poverty as a sanitary or hygienic force," says Dr. Beard, "is that in some natures it inspires the wish and supplies the capacity to escape from it, and in the long struggle we acquire the power and the ambition for something higher and nobler than wealth; the impulse of the rebound sends us farther than we had dreamed." Baron Niebuhr was the first to observe that the wealthy Roman families were short-lived, and perished from the effects of luxury and ease; and the same has been done by Mr. Freeman in English history. The Cæsars, the Valois, the Bourbons, and the English lords, either from vice, idleness, or impotence, were doomed to family extinction. The
