SLUM CONDITIONS 447 



fellows under similar conditions of life) of themselves and their 

 progenitors. But selection is keenest where the struggle for life 

 and comfort is hardest in the lowest stratum of society. Amongst 

 the very poor in cities, the offspring of the physically and mentally 

 weak are often of necessity more exposed to neglect and 

 disease than the children of their stronger fellows. Moreover they 

 suffer more from a lack of good and sufficient food. Consequently 

 in slums, far more than in the country, there is still a real, though 

 limited, elimination of the ' naturally ' weak in bone and muscle 

 such as occurs under savage conditions, an elimination which tends 

 to counterbalance any social sifting. The sifting, if real, is further 

 off-set by the fact that the town, offering better wages and superior 

 opportunities for enjoyment and openings for ambition, attracts the 

 best, the most robust and enterprising of the peasant stock. But 

 the main objection to the biometric hypothesis lies in the patent 

 fact that in the modern civilized world the rise and fall of men in 

 the social scale is due much more often to mental than to physical 

 peculiarities, and most of all to good or bad fortune occurring 

 during development. In the slums are, doubtless, some people 

 who have fallen because they are innately somewhat feeble- 

 minded ; that is, people whose mental capacity to profit by ex- 

 perience is so inferior to that of the average of their race that they 

 have sunk in consequence. A far larger number have sunk 

 through a mental susceptibility to the charm of alcohol which, on 

 the average, weighs alike on them and on their descendants. But 

 probably the largest number have descended, not through any 

 germinal inferiority, but through sheer misfortune, including the 

 great misfortune of a bad mental training. Owing to the growth 

 of machinery and population there is not enough work in the 

 land for all the hands that are capable of doing it. Therefore even 

 some of the capable must fail. Once a family has fallen into the 

 slums, it is exceedingly difficult for it to emerge again partly owing 

 to the lack of opportunity which extreme poverty entails, and 

 partly because the physical and mental traits acquired in the slum 

 are such as tend to unfit the individual for successful life in any other 

 environment. The statistics hitherto compiled by biometricians 

 demonstrate the precise average degree of physical superiority or 

 inferiority present in one section of the population as compared 

 to another. But if the thing must be done statistically before 

 we can decide whether the difference is innate or acquired, a 

 further inquiry is needed in which the children derived from one 

 section are compared to those derived from another after all the 



