The other extreme is common among those who are moved by first-hand knowledge of the poor, and feel so strongly the inadequacy of the biological view that they are eager to reject it altogether. Poverty, they say, is the chronic disease of a certain part of society, in which people are involved as they are in an epidemic. To have it indicates no inherent weakness, no biological trait of any kind; it does not discriminate and has, therefore, no selective value. Moreover, it does not eliminate, as it must in order to promote evolution. Those who contract it, whether of inferior types or not, do not cease to propagate, but increase more than the well-to-do, passing on their misery to their children. And, beyond this, poverty is propagated socially by the vice, squalor, shiftlessness and inefficiency which are inseparable from it, and spread from one family to another. The whole condition is described as a running sore, which poisons all it touches, and should be cured as a whole by remedial and antiseptic treatment. The theory underlying this view is that the sources of poverty are environmental, and that difference of biological type has so little to do with it as to be negligible. Or, assuming that it does play some part, it is best got at by first removing the social causes, after which any inferior hereditary types there may be can be discerned and eliminated. Under this view philanthropy, or, more generally, deliberate control of social conditions, is not “interference” but an essential part of the evolutionary process. It never has been nor can be absent so long as man is human and feels his solidarity with his fellows. It has no doubt done harm when unwise, but the remedy for this is not an impossible and illogical “letting alone,” but the endeavor to make it wiser. Indeed the biological particularists tacitly admit this by carrying on an educational campaign. No one with any unbiased knowledge of the facts can accept the crudely biological view. It is essentially an _a priori_ interpretation, drawn by analogy from subhuman life. Selection by a merely brutal struggle (which even among the animals is, in fact, modified by mutual aid) is out of place, retrogressive, impossible on a large scale, in human society; and a biology intelligent enough to grasp the implications of the social process must reject it. To such an intelligent biology the ground for combating poverty, disease and vice by social means is that this is part of a campaign for securing conditions which _on the whole_ make for the survival of higher types. We may lose something by it, we may preserve some who might better die, but the general outcome of our campaign, if rightly planned, is biologically good.