RELATION TO SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 93 



ities to which it opened the door. It has scoured away many pre- 

 judices and obsolete distinctions. It has cleared the ground for new 

 foundations. But its work has been least successful among the 

 morally weak and among those lacking vigor of personal initiative. 

 Its influence has been first assimilative and then selective, but not 

 in the highest sense socially coordinating. It has drawn forth from 

 the masses the most vigorous individuals and given them an en- 

 tirely new start toward personal independence and prosperity. But 

 it has left a great residuum, and for the educational treatment of 

 that residual social deposit it seems desirable that measures should 

 be taken very different from those which have proved themselves 

 appropriate to the needs of the more vigorous. In dealing with the 

 residual deposit which consists of the physically or mentally de- 

 teriorate, the time seems to have come, especially in the great centres 

 of population, for a more deliberate or far-reaching attempt to re- 

 construct for them a new social order upon the basis of a more 

 scientific organization and of a more provident discipline planned 

 in the interests of collective, or at least of corporate, well-being. 

 In our educational policy we seem -to have reached the point at which 

 it is necessary to discriminate between the needs of the vigorous 

 and of the deteriorate. For the former it is sufficient and prudent 

 to provide an educational system which postulates a good home 

 environment, adequate nutrition, and a healthy physique, and which, 

 therefore, relies with confidence upon methods which stimulate in- 

 dividuality and open the windows of new and varied opportunity. 

 But for the residuum of deteriorates a very different and more com- 

 prehensive course of treatment seems necessary. 



One danger of the situation is lest there should now begin in some 

 countries a too sweeping reaction against the individualizing tend- 

 ency of the best democratic elementary education and lest, with 

 the needs of the deteriorates too exclusively in their mind, some 

 administrators should attempt to curtail the freedom and intellectual 

 activities of the elementary schools as a whole (eminently well 

 suited as they are to help forward those children who are fitted by 

 natural endowment and other circumstances to take advantage of 

 them), in order to impress upon the whole elementary-school system a 

 form more appropriate to the needs of the physically and intellectually 

 deteriorate. This danger is increased by the fact that many earnest 

 social workers have, in the nature of things, been absorbed in their 

 labors among the deteriorates, and have been impressed by the fre- 

 quent failure of the present school system to supply the kind of moral 

 and physical discipline which the deteriorates require. Such workers, 

 while speaking with just authority about the needs of that section 

 of the population with which their labors have been concerned, have 

 often had comparatively little time to observe with equal thorough- 



