146 



HEREDITY AND CHRISTIAN PROBLEMS 



paupers usually become paupers, they do not 

 show by any means that all pauperism, or even 

 the largest part of it, is to be accounted for in 

 this way. 



(2) Environment. — A vicious environment is 

 an even more potent agent in producing pauper- 

 ism. Debilitated physical conditions make exertion 

 distasteful, and sometimes impossible. A vitiated 

 vital condition makes many men insensible to 

 moral motives. In others repeated failure in 

 the attempts to rise to better things has resulted 

 in despair, and despair is inert, except toward 

 evil. Let me quote a passage from "The Bitter 

 Cry of Outcast London:" "Every room in these 

 rotten and reeking tenement houses contains a 

 family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary in- 

 spector reports finding a father, mother, three 

 children, and four pigs ! . . . Here are seven 

 people living in one underground kitchen, and 

 a little dead child lying in the same room. 

 Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, 

 and a child who had been dead thirteen days. 

 Her husband, who was a cabman, had shortly 

 before committed suicide. ... In another room 

 nine brothers and sisters, from twenty-nine years 

 of age downward, live, eat, and sleep together. 

 Here is a mother who turns her children into 



