686 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



explanation. The English are improvident because they have been 

 for ages disciplined in improvidence. Extravagance has been made 

 habitual by shielding them from the sharp penalties extravagance 

 brings. Carefulness has been discouraged by continually showing to 

 the careful that those who were careless did as well as, or better than, 

 themselves. Nay, there have been positive penalties on carefulness. 

 Laborers working hard and paying their way have constantly found 

 themselves called on to help in supporting the idle around them ; have 

 had their goods taken under distress-warrants that paupers might be 

 fed ; and eventually have found themselves and their children reduced 

 also to pauperism. Well-conducted poor women, supporting them- 

 selves without aid or encouragement, have seen the ill-conducted re- 

 ceiving parish-pay for their illegitimate children. Nay, to such ex- 

 tremes has the process gone, that women with many illegitimate 

 children, getting from the rates a weekly sum for each, have been 

 chosen as wives by men who wanted the sums thus derived ! Genera- 

 tion after generation the honest and independent, not marrying till 

 they had means, and striving to bring up their families without assist- 

 ance, have been saddled with extra burdens, and hindered from leav- 

 ing a desirable posterity ; while the dissolute and the idle, especially 

 when given to that lying and servility by which those in authority are 

 deluded, have been helped to pi'oduce and to rear progeny, charac- 

 terized, like themselves, by absence of the mental traits needed for 

 good citizenship. And then, after centuries during which we have 

 been breeding the race as much as possible from the improvident, and 

 repressing the multiplication of the provident, we lift our hands and 

 exclaim at the recklessness our people exhibit ! If men, who, for a 

 score of generations, had by preference bred from their worst-tem- 

 pered horses and their least-sagacious dogs, were then to wonder be- 

 cause their horses were vicious and their dogs stupid, we should think 

 the absurdity of their policy paralleled only by the absurdity of their 

 astonishment ; but human beings instead of inferior animals being in 

 question, no absurdity is seen either in the policy or in the astonish- 

 ment. 



And now something more serious happens than the overlooking of 

 these evils wrought on men's natures by centuries of demoralizing in- 

 fluences. We are deliberately establishing further such influences. 

 Having, as much as we could, suspended the civilizing discipline of 

 an industrial life so carried on as to achieve self-maintenance without in- 

 jury to others, we now proceed to suspend that civilizing discipline in 

 another direction. Having in successive generations done our best to 

 diminish the sense of responsibility, by warding off evils which disre- 

 gard of responsibility brings, we now carry the policy further by re- 

 lieving parents from certain other responsibilities which, in the order 

 of Nature, fall on them. By way of checking recklessness, and dis- 

 couraging improvident marriages, and raising the conception of duty, 



