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And yet for earthly and social purposes our immediate method must be controlled by the clear and definite purpose of restricting, even if we cannot totally eliminate, the depressing element of the population. The effect which is incidental to confinement in prisons, asylums for the insane, homes for the feeble-minded, retreats for inebriates, will more and more be accepted deliberately as a rational object of legislation and administration. When society is duly impressed with the moral obligation to foster the health and happiness of posterity, we may hope for changes in customs, habits, and treatment of the inefficient. Beginning with the families of highest character, we may hope to see multiplied instances of women and men -- rarely men -- refusing to marry and have children, when they can foresee weakness and degeneracy in their possible offspring. Public opinion will find or provide something like mediaeval cloisters for those who dedicate their short lives of sickness to holy retirement rather than menace the future good of mankind.

Beginning with those most manifestly unfit for parenthood, the State will extend its custody to other classes, with a cautious reserve of the rights of citizens, and a conservative use of the power to deprive of liberty.

Education and Amelioration of Conditions. -- But we have not yet approached the limit of social power to limit the perpetuation of defect by other means. Public opinion will not sanction any wholesale scheme of segregation and custody until we have exploited the entire resources of sanitary science, improved administration, and of our public and private school system. We dare not presume to affirm that many children of the "slums" are unfit for freedom unless we give them, what many now do not have, a fair chance to prove what is in them. Many cases of consumption, perhaps all, are due to preventable contagion rather than to heredity.

Building and sanitary regulations of dwellings may obliterate many of the causes of debility and insanity which we have hastily ascribed to heredity. Sensuality itself, one of the most important springs of pauperism, may be materially reduced by awakening in the meagre lives of poor girls and boys diverting and competing spiritual interests of learning and of play which will contest the field with animal appetite.

The Social Settlement movement is still very young. No living man is prophet competent to forecast its future discoveries and influence. We do not yet imagine the transforming and transfiguring power latent in the Church. We cannot now foretell the changes, almost miraculous, which will occur in the moral habits, the interests, and the physical condition of the abject poor, when a divided Church shall agree to co-operate, and when a federation of spiritual enthusiasts shall come into the place of our present chaos and neglect in municipal life. We cannot yet foresee the happy improvement in foods, drainage, plumbing, management of contagious disease, sewerage, and schools which will be granted unto city governments, purified by the civil service reform.

Education and selection are not antagonistic: they are but two aspects of one vast and world-wide movement of the progressive nations.

Meantime we seek to develop, with larger resources of the special sciences, and with wider practical experience, the work of our fathers. There is one mind and one spirit in history, and one purpose toward which the whole creation moves.

That purpose, we reverently believe, is good. Without professions of an exhaustive knowledge of God, we humbly and lovingly enter upon his plans of mercy and progressive unfolding of good and truth, and ask his counsels in the deliberations of this week. These studies we dedicate to our heavenly Father and to his children.