It may be added that the time is coming when there will be a radical “transvaluation,” as Nietzsche would say, of the two fashions in which a father “leaves” something to his children. When a question is asked on this head now-a-days, we mean, foolishly enough, to enquire how much money the father left his child, and we say of a man that he has “inherited” a fortune. We can see plainly enough, as Theognis did two thousand five hundred years ago, that such an “inheritance” may and often does work in an anti-eugenic fashion. The gilded fool is swallowed by the maiden whose native sense would have rejected such a pill without its coat, and so the most pitiable degenerate becomes the father of his like. This point will be alluded to later. The present argument is that when we ask what a father “left” his children, we should really desire to learn what he _gave_ them when he was still alive and begot them. These vital, or mortal, characters which they inherit--shall we say good health or insanity--are of incalculably more moment to them as individuals than any monetary fortune, and of incalculably more moment for the future. Yet again is it true that there is no wealth but life, and the best “fortune” or wealth that you can leave your children is sane and vigorous life. =The case of slum childhood.=--We have already seen that even in the slums the children make a fresh start in a wonderful way, that their stunted growth, their proneness to disease, are mainly due to their environment, which it is therefore our duty to improve. This is _in general_ true, and depends evidently upon the fact that the acquired deterioration of the parents--_e.g._, dental decay--is not transmitted to their children--poisonings apart--so that the children make a fresh start where their parents did. It is necessary to point this out again and again, as the present writer for one has long been weary of doing, because it indicates our immediate duty in this respect, and forbids us to shirk it with any too-comprehensive phrases about “national degeneration.” Now who could have predicted that this plain and simple truth would be regarded by some people as constituting a denial--on strict scientific grounds, and as the very latest scientific pronouncement--of the principle of heredity? “The bubble of heredity has been pricked,” says Mr. Bernard Shaw. But popular muddleheadedness does not affect the palpable and universal truth that the _inherent_ characters of parents do tend to be inherited by their children; nor yet that these inherent characters differ profoundly in different individuals; nor yet the eugenic argument, which is that for purposes of parenthood, which means for the entire future, some of these should be taken and others left.