Sound charity does not knowingly aid the propagation of persons of inferior stock. It aims to distinguish them from those who are merely suffering from bad environment, and to set them apart in institutions or colonies, while the others are given a chance in a better environment. In no other way but by close and sympathetic study can this distinction be made, so that the intelligent social worker is the real social biologist, those who ignore the social factor being doctrinaires. Moreover, except as we bring about good social conditions we have no standard to tell what stocks _are_ socially desirable. Who are the “fit” whom we wish to preserve? Fitness implies some general situation by which it is tested, and the kind we want is fitness for the higher social order we are trying to build up, for the wise, just, prosperous, and spiritually progressing state. The only way to test for this is to create as high a social order as we can, and give each competing type a chance to function in it. To wipe out vast numbers by some crude process on the assumption that it eliminates the “unfit” will not do, or will do only so long as we are unable to substitute some better mode of selection. If all of our babies were subjected to the conditions that babies are subjected to in Terra del Fuego, most of them, I suppose, would die of exposure, and a very rapid “natural selection” would take place; but there is no reason to suppose that, for civilized purposes, the surviving type would be at all improved. The power to endure extreme cold is only a small merit in modern life. In the same way, of two children living in an infected tenement the one who dies may be of a socially more desirable type than the one who lives. The facts collected by Mr. Havelock Ellis and others regarding the feeble childhood of men of genius show how easily, under such a test, the better types might perish. The extreme biological view involves the absurdity of requiring that we tolerate indefinitely a bad state of society in order to produce a stock that is fit for a good one. Evidently the true way is to endeavor to better the society and the stock at the same time, expecting each to react favorably upon the other. I cannot, however, assent to the other extreme view, namely, that poverty has nothing to do with hereditary degeneracy and cannot in any manner or degree work against it. My impression is that destructive conditions, like misery, disease, and vice, though their action is largely indiscriminate, nevertheless attack degenerate stocks with special virulence, and have some tendency to diminish them relatively to those that are sounder. The process is crude and wasteful, needing to be replaced by a better one, but it probably has had, and still has, an important part in the evolution of the race.