146 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



factory, on 'change, or in the justice-room, go far toward the required 

 prejDaration. 



That which is really needed is a systematic study of natural causa- 

 tion as displayed among human beings socially aggregated. Though 

 a distinct consciousness of causation is the last trait which intellectual 

 progress brings — though with the savage a simple mechanical cause is 

 not conceived as such — though even among the Greeks the flight of a 

 spear was thought of as guided by a god — though, from their times 

 down almost to our own, epidemics have been habitually regarded as 

 of supernatural origin — and though among social phenomena, the most 

 complex of all, causal relations may be expected to continue longest 

 unrecognized ; yet, in our days, the existence of such causal relations 

 has become clear enough to force on all who think the inference that 

 before meddling with them they should be diligently studied. The 

 mere facts, now familiar, that there is a connection between the num- 

 bers of births, deaths, and marriages, and the price of corn, and that 

 in the same society dui'ing the same generation the ratio of crime to 

 population maintains a kindred regularity, should be sufficient to make 

 all see that human desires, using as guide such intellect as is joined 

 with them, act with approximate uniformity. It should be inferred 

 that, among social causes, those initiated by legislation, similarly op- 

 erating with an average regularity, must not only change men's actions, 

 but, by consequence, change their natures — probably in ways not in- 

 tended. There should be a recognition of the fact that social causa- 

 tion, more than all other causation, is a fructifying causation ; and it 

 should be seen that indirect and remote effects are no less inevitable 

 than proximate effects. I do not mean that there is denial of these 

 statements and inferences. But there are beliefs and beliefs — some 

 which are held but nominally, some which influence conduct in small 

 degrees, some which sway it irresistibly under all circumstances ; and 

 unhappily the beliefs of law-makers respecting causation in social 

 affairs are of the superficial sort. Let us look at some of the truths 

 which they tacitly admit, but which are scarcely at all taken account 

 of in legislation. 



There is the indisputable fact that each human being is in a cer- 

 tain degree modifiable both physically and mentally. Every theory 

 of education, every discipline, from that of the arithmetician to that 

 of the prize-fighter, every proposed reward for virtue or punishment 

 for vice, implies the belief, embodied in sundry proverbs, that the 

 use or disuse of each faculty, bodily or mental, is followed by an 

 adaptive change in it — loss of power or gain of power according to 

 demand. 



There is the fact, also in its broader manifestations universally rec- 

 ognized, that modifications of nature, in one way or other produced, 

 are inheritable. No one denies that by the accumulation of small 

 changes, generation after generation, constitution fits itself to condi- 



