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What is the effect on the self-supporting working people of the outdoor relief given to these unemployable? That is a problem we have not yet dared to face. Perhaps economic and statistical science is not yet able to solve it. But there are very competent economists who repeat to-day the essential argument of Thomas Chalmers: Outdoor relief, in the form of a subsidy to the feeble, is a curse to the wage-worker.

It may be found that much of our outdoor relief is just an indirect way of hiring people, who cannot produce their maintenance, to underbid workingmen in the market. If this be found true, social duty is clear: remove the incapable to non-competing colonies and permit the capable to maintain their standard of life without the weight of this competition about their necks. This plan, so far as I can see, would not add to the present burden, since we are already partly supporting them by an enormous pension without control of their labor or conduct. In agricultural self-supporting colonies, under State direction, they might be made more nearly capable of producing their maintenance than now; and it is certain that not so much of the money would go to liquor, tobacco, or sensual vice. But here again the breeder's principle of artificial selection must be rigorously applied; there must be no infants in these colonies of the residuum. The colony must not become a nursery of the incompetent.

IV. Child-saving. These methods are, at first sight, educational. For the most part the task is simple and hopeful: the homeless child is taken to a childless home, or to family care where love makes room for one more object of mercy and hope. Where a good home has been discovered, philanthropy has no further duty; the ordinary social forces take charge of the case. The old sad history is forgotten; with a new home begin new memories and a new career.

But child-saving is complicated by the intrusion of the incapable and the degenerate and perverted. Just as we were singing the triumph of environment over heredity, the stormy straits of adolescence had to be crossed, and some vicious ancestral trait burst through the weak film of acquired habit. In one awful moment we stood face to face with an ancient foe.

It may not be often, but this happens. Even in this most hopeful form of philanthropy, we come upon the necessity of making a choice between education and sequestration. Only too many examples could be given. The placing-out system rarely has to confess defect; but in these rare and tragical cases it meets its Waterloo. The institution and the colony of the unfit here are justified. Social selection makes education temporarily, for this mortal life, subordinate. A mastery of the principle of selection will help to solve the debated problem of the place of the institution in child-saving work. I venture the suggestion that the dispute could be settled in most cases of doubt by the physical examination of a competent medical officer.

V. Immigration. We are to discuss immigration. The central idea here is national participation in the culture of the human race. In great measure each nation produces degenerates by its own defects or neglects. Justice requires that to each shall be rendered his own. It is reasonable to suppose that we are doing England and Italy no real kindness by helping them to postpone necessary domestic reforms because it is easy to transport their home-made criminals and insane and feeble-minded. Their relief would be temporary, while the causes persist; and our damage will last for generations. The blending of healthy and similar peoples is often the beginning of a superior race, and social selection is promoted by that process.

But the intermarriage of a superior people with a very inferior people cannot, I think, be shown to have a good issue. Certainly, every atom of vicious and degenerate blood is poison in our veins. Our frontier is the line of battle against elements whose admission would be an occasion for which our descendants may curse us.

VI. In Charity Organization, city or State, all these problems come, one by one and all together, under daily review. But it is in these offices of central supervision and administration that we can hope to marshal and continue the agencies of betterment.

RÉSUMÉ AND CONCLUSION.

Education and Selection. -- In all our institutions of charity and correction we are employing, more or less consciously and intelligently, two principal instruments or methods. We are educating the educable; and we are seeking to eliminate, as far as possible, the depressing influence and the propagation of those who cannot be fitted for competitive life.

This does not imply that we exclude education from the care of those who are too feeble or deformed for the normal struggle of life. The home of the feeble-minded, even the asylum for lifelong State custody of irresponsible women, is still a school, and the educational process continues to that point where our dim lamps flicker, and the angels on the luminous side have their brighter lamps ready to guide the little pilgrim into the unseen. We believe that even the recidivist of the penitentiary is capable of learning lessons which may bear fruit in a more hospitable spiritual climate. Despair closes no prospect.