e only
point of view in much of this work, and the result is that usually
following when action is based upon half-truth. David Starr Jordan
says: "Charity creates the misery she tries to relieve; she never
relieves half the misery she creates," and he goes on to say that
_unwise_ charity is responsible for half the pauperism of the world;
that it is the duty of charity to remove the _causes_ of weakness and
suffering and equally to see that weakness and suffering are not
needlessly perpetuated. In this connection the following quotation
from Elderton is apt: "... the influence of the parental environmental
factor on the welfare of children is ... at present and has been in
the past the chief direction of legislative and philanthropic attack
on social evils. Degeneracy of every form has been attributed to
poverty, bad housing, unhealthy trades, drinking, industrial
occupation of women, and other direct or indirect environmental
influences on offspring. If we could by education, by legislation, or
by social effort change the environmental conditions, would the race
at once rise to a markedly higher standard of physique and mentality?
Much, if not the whole battle for social reform, has been based on the
assumption that this question was obviously to be answered in the
affirmative. No direct investigation has really ever been made of the
intensity of the influence of environment on man. To modify the
obviously repellent was the immediate instinct of the more gently
nurtured and controlling social class. Was this direction of social
reform really capable of effecting any substantial change? Nay, by
lessening the selective death rate, may it not have contributed to
emphasizing the very evils it was intended to lessen? These are the
problems which occur to the eugenist and call for investigation and,
if possible, settlement.... It is conceivable that the relation
between children's physique, for example, and parental occupation is
an indirect result of the inheritance of physique and a correlation
between parents' physique and their occupation. In other words, what
we are attributing to environment may be a secondary influence of
heredity itself. A weakling may have no option but to follow an
unhealthy trade, a man is a tailor or shoemaker, because he has not
the physique for smith or navvy. His offspring may be physically
inferior because he is a weakling and not because he follows an
unhealthy trade. Clearly, to solve our