existence, _i.e._, the law of Justice is suspended or modified, and the
unfit are allowed to live, or at least allowed to live a little longer,
long enough indeed to propagate their kind.

Hospitals and Homes and Charitable institutions all combine their
energies, and direct their efforts to nurture those whom the laws of
nature decree should die.

Sympathy and not indignation is aroused when a defective is born, and
the result of all the effort which that sympathy evokes is that the
little weakling and thousands such are safely led and tended all the way
to the child-bearing period of life, only to repeat their history, in
others.

Not only do defects "run in families," but they run in groups, and a
physical defect such as club-foot, cleft palate, or any arrested
development, is apt to be associated with some mental defect, and it is
the mental more than the physical defects of individuals that prevent
them being self-supporting helpful members of society.

In the "North American Review" for August, 1903, Sir John Gorst declares
that:--

"The condition of disease, debility, and defective sight and hearing, in
the public elementary schools in poorer districts, is appalling. The
research of a recent Royal Commission has disclosed that of the children
in the public schools of Edinburgh, 70 per cent, are suffering from
disease of some kind, more than half from defective vision, nearly half
from defective hearing, and 30 per cent, from starvation. The physical
deterioration of the recruits who offer themselves for the army is a