ns to succeeding generations and becomes
for them natural and unintended. These social institutions then
constitute a coercive environment, not over wholly unwilling subjects,
but over those whose wills are shaped by education and social pressure
to cooperate with the very institutions that suppress them.

Gradually, as subordinate classes become self-conscious, innovations
are made which aim to check the unbridled despotism of private
property; new conflicts thereupon take place and certain innovations
survive, which, at first artificial, become natural for the next
generations.

As society becomes more definite, reflective, and humane, as it
acquires fixed laws and government, it increases the range of
artificial selection; it supplants custom by statute, and remodels its
inherited institutions.

It is now animated by a new motive, the development of moral character
in all the people. With reference to this new motive social selection
is either direct or indirect. Direct selection is highly artificial,
but it is only negative. It consists in segregating the degenerates to
prevent propagation. Society cannot, of course, directly interfere
with the marriage choice of normal persons, for that would be to choke
the purest expression of personality. But it can isolate the two per
cent who will never rise to moral responsibility. This would doubtless
increase the wards of the state, but it is needed both for the reason
already given and, more especially, to clarify the public mind on the
causes of delinquency and dependency. As long as these evils can be
charged to heredity the public is blinded to the share that springs
from social injustice.

The increase and classification of the custodial population here
contemplated is a problem for administrative charity. Possibly the
colony system would make that population mutually self-supporting and
also remove the current sentimentalism against long isolation of the
incurables.

With the ground cleared of the true degenerates, the operations of
indirect social selection can be seen. This also is artificial, but in
a less mechanical way. It consists in so adjusting the political,
industrial, and social environment as to affect personality, either to
suppress or develop it. The two instruments are legal rights and
education. For example, the tenement-house congestion, with its
significant educational environment, is the product of laws of
property and taxation which favor ow