re to-day taking no broadly sympathetic view of
their treatment by exercising preventive measures. _Laissez faire?_

At the risk of easing the conscience, let us finally return to the
other side of society and look at a summarized statement of the
Edwards Family given by Boies and drawn from Winship's account of the
descendants of Jonathan Edwards. "1,394 of his descendants were
identified in 1900, of whom 295 were college graduates; 13 presidents
of our greatest colleges; 65 professors in colleges, besides many
principals of other important educational institutions; 60 physicians,
many of whom were eminent; 100 and more clergymen, missionaries, or
theological professors; 75 were officers in the army and navy; 60
prominent authors and writers, by whom 135 books of merit were
written and published and 18 important periodicals edited; 33 American
States and several foreign countries, and 92 American cities and many
foreign cities, have profited by the beneficent influence of their
eminent activity; 100 and more were lawyers, of whom one was our most
eminent professor of law; 30 were judges; 80 held public office, of
whom one was Vice President of the United States; 3 were United States
Senators; several were governors, members of Congress, framers of
State constitutions, mayors of cities, and ministers to foreign
courts; one was president of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company; 15
railroads, many banks, insurance companies, and large industrial
enterprises have been indebted to their management. Almost if not
every department of social progress and of the public weal has felt
the impulse of this healthy and long-lived family. It is not known
that any one of them was ever convicted of crime."

The serious consideration of bodies of facts like those contained in
some of these pedigrees leads every thoughtful and sympathetic, every
humanely minded, human being to ask--What _can_ we _do_ about it? The
display of such conditions stimulates us to measures of relief. It is
greatly to be regretted that the honest desire to do good often leads
to the performance of ill-considered or unconsidered acts which may
result in positive injury to the constitution of society, or at any
rate at best merely in the amelioration of the immediate situation
without reference to ultimate profit or penalty, or to the necessity
for interminable amelioration. Such relief leaves out of account the
fact that modifications are not heritable--not perman