Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/289

Rh from birth by circumstances the most favorable to every kind of growth and excellence. The fact that people enjoying these latter advantages become strong in body, mind and estate, the fact that they are high-spirited and sensitive and self-assertive, is no evidence that they are essentially superior to or different from their brethren who, under contrasted conditions, fail to achieve like results.

Few people in a democratic country venture today to put a different doctrine in plain words; but democratic institutions are still so crude that it is impossible to analyze the social situation, and to conclude that democratic principles, as thus far realized, exhibit the final type of society, without basing the inference in part upon tacit denial of the similarity just claimed. We are getting familiar with differences of social conditions which can be contemplated tranquilly only on the implied presumption that some of us are made from finer clay than the rest.

We accuse ourselves of no fault when we decline to provide for our domestic animals the same kind of intellectual and moral or even physical advantages which we secure for our sons and daughters. We assume that the wants and capacities of puppies and kittens are radically different from those of children, and we act accordingly. But some of us are in conditions so different from those surrounding many of our fellows that equanimity in view of the situation can be justified only by resort to a similar presumption with reference to them.

Residents in every large city know that thousands of children are growing up in their vicinity in a physical environment unfit for cattle. These thousands see nothing of the ordinary refinements of family life. They are almost entire strangers to primary education. They remain outside the pale of moral and religious influence and they presently recruit the army of the unemployed. They prey peacefully or violently upon the industry and the morality of the community, and sooner or later they fill the workhouse, the jail, the charity hospital and the potter's field.

It is not this large class alone which gives ocular proof that, whatever be the creed of men or of schools or of churches, our