SCIENTIFIC PHILANTHROPY. 301 



cer, De Candolle, Ribot, Galton, and Jacoby, include tbe study of the 

 effects of natural selection and physiological or moral heredity in 

 human society. Philanthropy ought not to content itself with reasons 

 of sentiment ; it should become scientific. Few questions are better 

 adapted than that of public relief to demonstrate the necessity of this 

 progress and the extreme complexity of social problems, in which the 

 most various rights are involved and the laws of natural history add 

 their force to those of political economy. What, in the Darwinian 

 point of view, becomes of the public duty of relief ? First, what is 

 its moral foundation, misconceived by certain partisans of Malthus 

 and Darwin, and what are its necessary limits ? Secondly, are there 

 not biological laws that intervene in a question at first sight entirely 

 moral ; and can the legislator neglect the social consequences of these 

 natural laws ? In short, has philanthropy regulated by science a salu- 

 tary or an injurious influence on the movement of population, and 

 does it produce in the race a useful or a harmful selection, progress or 

 decay ? These are the principal problems deserving a long study, to 

 which we will at least call the attention of readers. If we only show 

 clearly their difficulties, and vaguely forecast the solutions of them, we 

 shall not have wasted time or trouble. 



The partisans of Darwin generally adopt in social science the law 

 of Malthus, from which Darwin himself has drawn most important 

 consequences in natural history. Now, Malthus has conceived that by 

 this law he could condemn absolutely that philanthropy which is prac- 

 ticed under the form of public benevolence. H3 not only denies all 

 duty of relief on the part of the state, but also declares private char- 

 ity dangerous and irreligious. Leave to Nature, he says, severely, the 

 office of punishing the improvidence of the father who calls to life 

 more children than he can support ; Nature will not fail to perform her 

 task, and it is a providential one. Since Nature is charged with gov- 

 erning and punishing, it would be a very foolish and misplaced ambi- 

 tion to pretend to put ourselves in her place, and take upon ourselves 

 all the odium of execution. Then give up that guilty man to the 

 penalty imposed by Nature. The aid and assistance of parishes should 

 be closed against him, and, if private charity extends any help to him, 

 the interest of humanity imperiously requires that that help shall not 

 be too abundant. He must be made to learn that the laws of Nature, 

 that is, the laws of God, have condemned him to a life of pain for 

 having violated them, and that he has no kind of a right as against 

 society to obtain from it the slightest portion of support. Can this 

 summary condemnation of public charity, pronounced by the Malthu- 

 sians and the radical Darwinians, be accepted from the point of view 

 of morals and right, and must we inevitably maintain it from the point 

 of view of natural history, or even of the laws laid down by Darwin ? 



Regarding the question of right, it seems to us that a capital dis- 

 tinction should be made between the present and the future, between 



