Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/458

434 and the Neo-Lamarckians, as to whether acquired traits are transmitted, only tends to bring out more vividly the simplicity of the law of selective action. Man, as regards himself, has apparently thwarted this law. The humane impulses of man often interfere with selective action; sentimental women and sympathetic magistrates assist in the freeing of criminals who usually find themselves "serving" time by an immediate repetition of their offenses, often in aggravated forms (vide Sawtell), having, however, while free, united, out of wedlock, with the lowest of their kind, to perpetuate and possibly accentuate their criminal taint.

The indiscriminate giving of alms and promiscuous feeding of tramps thwarts, in a measure, the work of selective action. Were it not for these interferences the diminution in number of the vicious, incompetent, and lazy would be as marked from year to year as is the decreasing death-rate in cities where sanitary measures are rigorously enforced. What, then, are the unfavorable conditions against which the uneducated vicious class have to contend? In nearly all the essays written on crime and its causes, authors finally unite in agreeing that the slums of a city are the main roots of the evil, or, more correctly, the culture element which fosters this mass of social corruption. Mr. B. O. Flower, in the Arena, says, "The slums of our cities are the reservoirs of physical and moral death, an enormous expense to the state, a constant menace to society, a reality whose shadow is at once colossal and portentous."

As a class, these people live under the worst sanitary conditions, in districts of the city having the highest death-rate. Miss Besant, in a lecture, says: "In London the population is between three and four millions, and of it one person in every five dies in jail, prison, or workhouse. Fifty-five years is the average of citizens of the comfortable class, while twenty-nine is that of the manual laborers. ... Of one hundred babies born, fifty lie in the cemetery before they are five years old, while of the upper classes but eighteen of every hundred die." (In one city in Europe, where a long series of observations has been made, it is found that the death-rate is higher on the shady side of the street.) The hot blasts of summer and the chills of winter mark their quota; their ignorance of all medical science leads them to employ a quack, or languish and die without medical aid. If inclined to work, their unrestrained appetite for alcohol shuts them out from all positions of trust, and drives them to the roughest of manual labor often fraught with danger. Their carousals and fights, innutritious and unwholesome foods, violations of all sanitary laws, and many