starvation in order to perfect an invention or prosecute scientific researches. We seem to condemn either extreme: yet what clear and accepted principle can be stated for determining the true mean? Again, as we have seen, some think that a parent has no right to bequeath his inheritance away from his children, unless they have been undutiful: and in some states this is even forbidden by law. Others, however, hold that children as such have no claims to their parents’ wealth: but only if there is a tacit understanding that they will succeed to it, or, at any rate, if they have been reared in such habits of life and social relations as will render it difficult and painful for them to live without inherited wealth. It would be tedious to go in detail through all the degrees of consanguinity, as it is clear that our conception of the mutual duties of kinsmen becomes vaguer as the kinship becomes more remote. Among children of the same parents, brought up together, affection of more or less strength grows up so naturally and commonly, that we regard those who feel no affection for their brothers and sisters with a certain aversion and moral contempt, as somewhat inhuman: and we think that in any case the services and kind acts which naturally spring from affection ought to be rendered to some extent; but the extent seems quite undefined. And even towards remoter kinsmen we think that a certain flow of kindly feeling will attend the representation of consanguinity in men of good dispositions. Some indeed still think that cousins have a moral right to a man’s inheritance in default of nearer heirs, and to assistance in any need; but it seems equally common to hold that they can at most claim to be selected _ceteris paribus_ as the recipients of bounty, and that an unpromising cousin should not be preferred to a promising stranger.