Good environment would "take care of the women." The women being properly nursed, fed, taught, and honoured, would select partners who would not shock them morally, nor disgust them physically. Virtuous, refined, and intelligent women do not, in general--there are exceptions--love and marry men of weak minds, nor men of diseased bodies, nor men of low moral type. Therefore, given proper environment, the "born criminal" and the mental weakling would not be able to find wives. But that is not the only way in which good environment would affect the breed. Nearly all degeneration is caused by bad environment, and good environment would stop degeneration, and by that means would improve the mental, moral, and physical average. It has been suggested, by some of the most dismal scientists, that to prevent the spread of degeneration we should prevent degenerates from marrying. But I think a sounder method would be to stop the production of degenerates, by abolishing the environment that produces them. As to the atavist, or "born criminal," I would point out that one of the laws of heredity is the tendency to "revert to the normal." That is to say, genius and atavism do not "persist." In a few generations the atavist and the genius have bred back to the average level. That, as I have pointed out, is due to the mixture of blood by marriage. Thanks to this law, even the "born criminal" cannot often reappear. An example of the working of this law is afforded by the descendants of the Australian convicts, who have turned out excellent men and women. I think, then, that we need not be seriously troubled by the gloomy forebodings of our pessimists. With bad environment human nature has no chance: with good environment human nature will take care of itself. And now let us look at some of the facts in proof of the magical results of improved environment. I have before me a newspaper report of an interview with Mr. George Jackson, secretary of the Middlemore Children's Emigration Homes. This society was founded some thirty years ago, and has since sent out to Canada more than three thousand children from the slums. The children came from the worst of slums, and from the worst of homes. They are spoken of by the reporter as being rescued from homes "where they are in daily contact with grinding poverty and misery, in an atmosphere of moral and physical foulness, with parents who are drunken, criminal, and inhuman." And of these three thousand waifs _not two in a hundred turned out badly_. To give an idea of the working of a changed environment in the case of these children, I will quote from the report of the _Birmingham Daily Post_: