Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/504

490 are missing—"certain emotions responding to right and wrong"—is parallel with the supposition that the individual may be born again by a kind of mental baptism. The true effect of intellectual training is to clothe heredity with renewed power, giving the children a moral vantage over the parent, and enabling them to leave to their descendants a much further development of the faculties thus fostered, and a still higher power in producing beneficial variations which are a blessing to the race.

It now becomes necessary to inquire. What is the public duty of relief? It will not be disputed that the function of government is to maintain the equal rights of all its citizens; it owes them in the first place justice. When the state undertakes to appropriate annually from the tax-payers millions of dollars for the support of the incapables, it is taking money from the former in no wise for the maintenance of their rights. The more the state does for the improvident the less it does for the provident. It is conceded that the right of government to educate the illiterate and to check the vicious is a just one; because it is a duty society owes to itself. The State is under no moral duty to take care of the least of its citizens; but somehow our doctrine of political equality has evolved the socialistic idea of economic equality. Stuart Mill put state aid in this way: The laborer out of work says it is the duty of society to find work for him; but surely it is his duty as a member of that society to find work for every other unemployed man. As an organized business, with paid executive officers, numerous employés, and bureaus of distribution, modern philanthropy has become a thriving profession. Asylums have been built to keep pace with the increase of the insane; hospitals are founded to meet the constant wants of imbeciles; and almshouses are being erected to accommodate the number of paupers. In this State twenty-five years ago there was one pauper to every one hundred and thirty people, now there is one to every thirty! The charities of the city of New York are something enormous, whether we consider the money spent or the two hundred and fifty charitable organizations. The poor in New York can be born in a public hospital, educated in a public school, clothed and fed in a public reformatory, and doctored in a public dispensary; if they die, it is at public expense they are buried. In a single phrase, metropolitan charity has fully provided for every want from the cradle to the grave.

In the report of the State Board of Charities, the committee say:

The pauper, the insane, the deaf-mute, and the blind, appeal to charity; but these juvenile offenders excite both pity for their own condition, and solicitude for their potential influence for evil in society. Some of them show evidence of congenital deformities and defects....It is from the ranks of these that the Communists and Nihilists of the future may be recruited. Whatever may be