490 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



are missing — "certain emotions responding to right and wrong" — 

 is parallel with the supposition that the individual may be born again 

 by a kind of mental baptism. The true effect of intellectual train- 

 ing is to clothe heredity with renewed power, giving the children 

 a moral vantage over the parent, and enabling them to leave to their 

 descendants a much further development of the faculties thus fos- 

 tered, and a still higher power in producing beneficial variations which 

 are a blessing to the race. 



It now becomes necessary to inquire. What is the public duty of 

 relief ? It will not be disputed that the function of government is to 

 maintain the equal rights of all its citizens ; it owes them in the first 

 place justice. When the state undertakes to appropriate annually 

 from the tax-payers millions of dollars for the support of the incapa- 

 bles, it is taking money from the former in no wise for the main- 

 tenance of their rights. The more the state does for the improvident 

 the less it does for the provident. It is conceded that the right of 

 government to educate the illiterate and to check the vicious is a 

 just one ; because it is a duty society owes to itself. The State 

 is under no moral duty to take care of the least of its citizens ; but 

 somehow our doctrine of political equality has evolved the social- 

 istic idea of economic equality. Stuart Mill put state aid in this 

 way : The laborer out of work says it is the duty of society to find 

 work for him ; but surely it is his duty as a member of that society to 

 find work for every other unemployed man.* As an organized busi- 

 ness, with paid executive ofiicers, numerous employes, and bureaus of 

 distribution, modern philanthropy has become a thriving profession. 

 Asylums have been built to keep pace with the increase of the insane ; 

 hospitals are founded to meet the constant wants of imbeciles ; and 

 almshouses are being erected to accommodate the number of paupers. 

 In this State twenty-five years ago there was one pauper to every one 

 hundred and thirty people, now there is one to every thirty ! The 

 charities of the city of New York are something enormous, whether 

 we consider the money spent or the two hundred and fifty charitable 

 organizations. The poor in New York can be bom in a public hos- 

 pital, educated in a public school, clothed and fed in a public reforma- 

 tory, and doctored in a public dispensary ; if they die, it is at public 

 expense they are buried. In a single phrase, metropolitan charity has 

 fully provided for every want from the cradle to the grave. 



In the report of the State Board of Charities,! the committee say : 



The panper, the insane, the deaf-mute, and the blind, appeal to charity ; but 

 these juvenile offenders excite both pity for their own condition, and solicitude 

 for their potential influence for evil in society. Some of them show evidence of 

 congenital deformities and defects. ... It is from the ranks of these that the 

 Communists and Nihilists of the future may be recruited. Whatever may be 



* See further, " Political Economy," vol. ii, pp. 690, 691. 



f The Fifteenth Report of the State Board of Charities, p. 167. 



