A man who lives in the slums is unfit to live anywhere else, so it is said. A man who has made a million by a turn in the stock market, lives in a palace, but can only write his name to a check, and can not tell a spade from a rake. J. Pierpont Morgan possessed boundless wealth and tremendous power in the financial world. Walt Whitman, the humane poet, had a small competence and no power at all except to touch the hearts of mankind. Burns was a plowman; Bunyan a tinker; a writer of slang and jokesmith, makes a million; Brigham Young was a prophet and a ruler, wealthy and honored; Stevenson was in the last stages of tuberculosis; Byron was a cripple; Johnson was a glutton, and the composer of a silly ragtime waltz owns an automobile and keeps a valet and a chauffeur. Which of these shall we select as the type, and how are we going to tell whether the offspring of our selections will come up to the type? Modern medical scientists declare in the most positive terms, that every child is born free from infectious diseases, and at the moment of its birth is a perfect type. That the first breath it draws fills it with the germs of future diseases that tend to make it a weak and diseased abortion of humanity. All its troubles come from its surroundings or environments, which are the conditions it must meet and with which it must struggle to live at all. It may avoid future disease from the infecting germs it breathes at the moment of birth, by making its environments better, purer and altering the bad conditions under which it lives. We know, because we can see it every day, that of two plants or animals, that one will survive which is the fittest to endure the conditions in which both exist. He, the man, or it, the plant, can be afforded opportunities in the way of good food, care, and proper training, to resist the encroachments of disease and degenerate conditions. Hence, we may say, that the question of which man shall survive, depends upon the conditions under which he shall struggle for survival. There is no law of nature here, it is the law of common sense and good government. We are surrounded by conditions best suited for strength and survival, and the conditions which promote weakness, disease and degeneracy are removed or beyond our reach. In a nation of marauders or robbers, those who live by spoliation and the sword, would be the fittest to survive, and they would be a different type of men from those who get first place in a nation of traders, where fierceness and strength are less called for than tenacity of purpose and clearness of head. When a man says he is poor, somebody says, that man is poor because he is not fitted to gain wealth. But we say, he is not fitted to gain wealth under the conditions of his life. Take him out of those conditions, put opportunities in his way and he becomes “fit” because he gains wealth. It is done every day.