give rise to dependence are not inherent but are produced by social conditions themselves, like faulty education, bad surroundings, and the like. Through the improvement of social conditions, therefore, there is no doubt that much of the present poverty of the civilized world can be wiped out. This is not saying, however, that poverty and dependence will ever be wholly eliminated. Probably, no matter how ideal social conditions might be, even under the most just social organization, there would be some accidents and variations in individuals which would produce a condition of dependence. Moreover, the elimination of poverty and pauperism is not so simple as some suppose. It is not wholly a question of the improvement of social conditions; it also involves the control of physical heredity, because many of the principal defects that give rise to dependence are inherent in heredity. But man can control to some extent even the birth of the inferior or unfit classes. This may seem, however, so far in the future that it is idle to discuss it, although, as we shall see, society is undoubtedly taking steps to prevent the propagation of the unfit. In the meantime, however, so long as humanity progresses through natural selection we shall have poverty, to some extent at least, no matter how much industrial and social conditions may be improved. Yet without the control of physical heredity or the substitution of artificial for natural selection, poverty can be undoubtedly greatly lessened, and it is the rational aim of applied social science to discover how this may be done. It would seem that the existence of 10,000,000 persons in the United States living below the poverty line cannot be justified upon either moral or economic grounds; that it represents a great waste of human life and human resources, and that much of the social maladjustment which this poverty is an expression of might easily yield to wisely instituted remedial measures. If the social maladjustment which is undoubtedly the cause of the bulk of modern poverty were done away with, it is safe to say that it would be reduced to less than one third of its present dimensions.