To this class we may, if we will, offer work, but in offering bread, we undertake a greater responsibility than we perhaps are aware of. Food and clothing means the power to live and marry, and as there are limits to everyone’s resources, when we give anything, even a penny to a passing beggar, we are giving some of this power, we are taking upon ourselves the responsibility of “selecting,” and are influencing this selection, let it be in never so small a degree. We are playing with humanity the part of the gardener with his flowers, or the farmer with his stock. This is a very high function, and a difficult one to perform judiciously, yet we all of us presume to exercise it without thought or training. There can be no doubt that the lawgivers responsible for the present condition of public charity, and private individuals who assist cases whose thorough investigation they have been too lazy to take up, are in part responsible for the perpetuation of the criminal classes in the community. _The Poor in very Deed._ If we place the vicious and idle, though capable, pauper on one side, in a class by himself--a criminal class--we can deal fairly and reasonably with the other two classes. Under the varying conditions of life some people are hardly pressed upon, and the burden is light upon other persons’ shoulders. Our conditions of life, although perhaps selective in the main, are by no means uniformly so, and thus it happens that the amount of money in a man’s pocket is no certain criterion of even his capacity to make it. Especially in a community such as ours, where men pass in a lifetime from poverty to riches or the reverse, and often as a result of surrounding conditions over which they have no control, we may have stupidity and vice reposing sumptuously on inlaid Florentine, while intelligence and virtue are seated on rush-bottom. As I hope to bring out shortly, there is too little selective influence in a civilised state. Some of our old aristocratic families were headed no doubt by men of great capacity at their commencement, but it was the organisation of Romish civilisation that gave them the conquest over their worse organised fellow-kinsmen settled in England. Blood for blood, innate quality for innate quality, there was little to choose between them, yet circumstances made one the villein and the other the lord. Selective influences that might have operated in a savage community have been kept in abeyance to a great measure by inherited property and class distinction; and though, fortunately, good men are continually rising, and vicious, idle men are falling, yet this is to a great extent kept in check. Thus we find in the lower class many men and women of excellent physique and mental capacity doing in their lives as much as can be expected from anybody. From the biological point of view--that of blood, bone, muscle and brain, a view which we, in our biological study, are bound to take--the lower labouring class is little