Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/782

758 a healthy start. To insure correct environment and habit, particularly in the early years of life, is of vital importance to the well-being and efficiency of the individual. This, unfortunately, is not, and in many cases can not, be done. Hence the fearfully unequal physical, mental, and moral equipment of mankind, that allows the minority to have too much, the majority too little, of the world's necessities and comforts.

This question, however, has a broader interest than is merely involved in economics. One of the ultimate aims of life upon earth is the perpetuation of the species, an essential incident of which is the struggle to live. This aim of life in Nature is seen in all creations, from trees and insects up to man. Under the term "struggle of life" are included many complex factors. Such problems as how to conserve and prolong life, how to lower the death-rate in children, how to produce good hereditary development, how to strengthen the bodies and minds and enlarge the spiritual bounds of men—all these, and many other questions, are included in a conception of this struggle. It is evident that those are the best conditions of life that lead to the highest development of the physical, mental, and moral faculties, and the largest and best growth of the species. The all-important question is this: How are the present conditions of society favoring and how subverting a successful struggle on the part of many of its members? How far do they tend to cripple the best development of life? This larger and more absorbing question includes the narrower one we are here discussing, as to the observed inequalities of society. It is too large a theme for a single essay. A brief glance at the varying conditions that produce social inequality may be of interest.

1. .—As a rule, the more bodily vigor a person possesses the better will be his chance of getting on in the world. Many people fail because they have not the physical strength for prolonged and successful effort. What fair chance, then, has a child beginning life in an overcrowded tenement-house, all of whose bodily functions are from the first contaminated? The cells, of which the human body is but an aggregate, might at this time by healthy surroundings and physiological living, have marked upon them an impress of lasting vigor; by foul air and improper nourishment they likewise have sown in them the seed of an early degeneration. After a large dispensary experience, I have no hesitancy in saying that the great majority of children brought up in the tenement-houses of New York are, in greater or less degree, affected by a constitutional taint, usually scrofulous or rachitic. Such a vicious condition grows by what it feeds on. Each generation will get worse from the addition of hereditary influences to the faulty environment, unless something is done to check these evils. It is not difficult to foresee what will result in a community if a large proportion of its inhabitants are, by reason of their physical organization, seriously handicapped in the struggle