last century and the rush into the cities with their over-crowding, it is perhaps more disastrous now than ever before: _yet_ it remains true that most of the babies born in the slums are splendid little specimens of humanity--so far as physique is concerned--bearing no marks of degeneration to correspond with the deterioration of their parents. In a word, heredity works--the racial poisons apart, as we shall see--so that each generation gets a fresh start. _If there be no process of selection_, each new generation begins where its predecessor began and is as a whole neither worse nor better, whether physically or psychically. =Eugenics and infant mortality.=--In the face of the foregoing, which merely outlines the appalling indictment that ought to be framed against civilisation for its treatment of its children, it is evidently incumbent upon us to answer the objector who should say that the whole purpose and argument of our present enquiry is premature, and that surely our first business should be not to propose any novel and revolutionary doctrine as to the choice of parents and of children, but rather to stop this child slaughter and child damage--in other words, that we should devote ourselves rather, not to providing children with a good heredity, but to providing them with a good environment, it being only too demonstrable that the environment we at present provide for the great majority of them is deadly and abominable in the extreme. This argument is all the stronger because most of the children are admittedly fit physically at birth. It would seem as if there were little to complain of in their heredity, whilst there is certainly almost everything to complain of in their environment.