442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ents 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 ap- 

 parently thwarted this law. The humane impulses of man often 

 interfere with selective action; sentimental women and sympa- 

 thetic 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, how- 

 ever, 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 meas- 

 ures 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 con- 

 ditions, 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 



* Some of the following paragraphs have already been published by the writer in the 

 Boston Herald, under the signature of C. B. D. 



