The inefficiency of labor is by no means the fault of the individual laborer alone. Heredity has bankrupted him before he started on his career. His parents were probably as inefficient as he is--and most likely _their_ parents also. One who sees much of the lower grades of labor ceases to wonder why children turn out worthless, knowing what the parents were. General Francis A. Walker, in opening the Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute at Boston lately, said: "There is great virtue in the inherited industrial aptitudes and instincts of the people. You can no more make a first-class dyer or a first-class machinist in one generation than you can in one generation make a Cossack horseman or a Tartar herdsman. Artisans are born, not made." Our incompetents may plead that they were not born competent. It does not readily appear what we are going to do about this working of heredity against labor, except as by the slow and gradual improvement of mankind these low strata of existences are lifted up to a higher plane. Meanwhile we must blame less harshly and work a little more earnestly to better the human stock. The environment of labor handicaps still further this organic deficiency. In most of our great cities the homes of the workingmen are shockingly unwholesome; unsunned, badly drained, overcrowded. The tenements of New York are enough alone to take the life out of labor. City factories often are not much better. The quality of the food sold in the poorer sections of our cities--meat, bread, milk, etc.--is defectively nutritious, even where it is not positively harmful. The sanitary conditions are thus against labor. This could be largely reflected by the State and city authorities, and ought to be rectified in simple justice to society at large, which is now so heavily burdened by the manifold evils bred under such conditions. Government guards carefully the rights both of land and capital by an immense amount of legislation and administration. Has not labor a fair claim to an equal solicitude on the part of the State? Health is the laborer's source of wealth, but it is by no means so farefully looked after as are the resources of the other two factors of production. It is only within the last three years that in New York we have had a satisfactory tenement-house law or a fair administration of any law bearing on this evil. There ought to be the exercise of some such large wisdom as led the city of Glasgow to spend $7,000,000 in reconstructing three thousand of the worst tenements of that city, with a consequent reduction of the death rate from 54 per thousand to 29 per thousand, and with a corresponding decrease in pauperism and crime.