tions, and finally, not being met
early enough by other moral, mental, and physical influences, they have
modified her organization, until her will is scarcely able to control
them and she gives herself up to them. All those who instruct or govern
"Houses of Refuge," or "Reform Schools," or Asylums for criminal
children and youths, will recall many such instances.

They are much better known in the Old World than this; they are far more
common here in the country than in the city.

My own experience during twenty years has been in this regard singularly
hopeful. I have watched great numbers of degraded families in New York,
and exceedingly few of them have transmitted new generations of paupers,
criminals, or vagrants.

The causes of this encouraging state of things are not obscure. The
action of the great law of "Natural Selection," in regard to the human
race, is always towards temperance and virtue. That is, vice and extreme
indulgence weaken the physical powers and undermine the constitution;
they impair the faculties by which man struggles with adverse conditions
and gets beyond the reach of poverty and want. The vicious and sensual
and drunken die earlier, or they have fewer children, or their children
are carried off by diseases more frequently, or they themselves are
unable to resist or prevent poverty and suffering. As a consequence, in
the lowest class, the more self-controlled and virtuous tend constantly
to survive, and to prevail in "the struggle for existence," over the
vicious and ungoverned, and to transmit their progeny. The natural drift
among the poor is towards virtue. Probably no vicious organization with
very extreme and abnormal tendencies is transmitted beyond the fourth
generation; it ends in insanity or cretinism or the wildest crime.

The result is then, with the worst-endowed families, that the "gemmules"
or latent forces of hundreds of virtuous, or at least, not vicious,
generations, lie hid in their constitutions. The immediate influences of
parents or grandparents are, of course, the strongest latent tendencies
to good, coming down from remote ancestors, be aroused and developed.

Thus is explained the extraordinary improvement of the children of crime
and poverty in our Industrial Schools; and the reforms and happy change
is seen in the boys and girls of our dangerous classes when placed in
kind Western homes. The change of circumstances, the improved food, the
daily moral and mental