To induce the state of mind in parents which will help on the better and more adequate social care of these afflicted members of society, the sense of shame and the keen suffering from social stigma in such cases must be mitigated. It must be seen that although it may be the fault of one or both parents that such a child has come into the world, it is an added and deeper fault, even in many cases a social crime, to leave that child in ordinary relations of life. It is true that what Dr. Caleb W. Saleeby well calls "racial poisons" are often the cause of the damaged germ plasm that starts the handicapped human being along his devious course. Alcohol, syphilis, and other elements of degenerative action may have doomed the child and in such cases the father's or mother's sin or carelessness is the cause of the child's tragical condition. In such cases the dullest conscience must feel remorse. It is, however, not always the fault of the immediate parents. It may be a far more remote inheritance that has started the degenerative psychosis that results in either insanity, feeble-mindedness, dipsomania, or "general debility of character." =Heredity.=--Prof. E.G. Conklin says, "Heredity may be defined as the appearance in offspring of characters whose differential causes are found in germ cells." Doctor Galton says "the two parents between them contribute on an average one-half of each inherited faculty, or each parent one-quarter. The grandparents contribute between them one-quarter, or each one-sixteenth." The responsibility for a poor specimen of humanity, therefore, is not solely the parents'; they may share it with a considerable group. Many a defective obviously owes his condition to some remote ancestor, "to the third or fourth generation," as the old Scripture said; and many a charming trait, for which the immediate parents would like to take credit, is really a gift from some great-grandparent. This fact should make it easier for parents of defectives to bear the burden and easier to make it seem less a shameful confession of individual responsibility and more a sad confirmation of the fact that we are all members one of another and no one lives to himself alone.