This is fairly obvious in common observation. At a gathering, which I was privileged to attend, of the principal men of a neighboring commercial city, it seemed that the prevailing type was quite commonplace. They appeared kindly and of a good business intelligence, but hardly in such a degree as one might expect in the leading men of a leading community. Apparently the city had grown and these men attached, as it were, to the growing branches, had been lifted up accordingly. I take it that large gains, and even gains that are unjust, so far as individual merit is concerned, are inevitable, though some of the more flagrant inequalities might be reduced by social reform. We must, then, deal with them after they are made, and this points to a policy of drastic taxation, the revenue to be used for the common welfare, and also to moral control of the use of wealth through public opinion and social ideals. It is probably true that the poor, of a scattered and sporadic sort, will always be with us; but organized poverty might be abolished. I mean that the misery class, now existing at the bottom of the economic scale and perpetuating itself through lack of opportunity for the children, might be eliminated through minimum standards of family life and cognate social reforms. For those who, for whatever reason, fall below the standards there should be a special care designed to prevent their condition becoming established in misery environments, and so passed on to another generation. As it is now, lack of opportunity perpetuates misery, which in turn prevents opportunity, and so on in a vicious circle. The general result is a state of social degeneracy through which ignorance, vice, inefficiency, squalor, and lack of ambition are reproduced in the children. Families not far above the misery line also need special care to prevent their being crowded over it. While it seems likely that, in spite of all our precautions, misery will continue to be generated, we ought to be able to prevent its organization in a continuous class. To do this we shall certainly have to proceed with the delicate task of supplementing family responsibility without essentially impairing it. We have already come far in this direction, with our compulsory education, restrictions on child labor, removal from parents of abused or neglected children, probation officers, mothers’ pensions, visiting nurses, medical inspection in the schools, and so on. We need to do much more of the same sort, and the question just how far we can go in a given direction without doing more harm than good must be decided by experience.