how can they possibly produce what is ennobling, elevating, and exalting?

The education of an ornamentist should be of the highest and most refining character; he should be a trained scholar, a gentleman and a poet; and yet, also, a utilitarian, having scientific knowledge. And it is this which your museum and art schools will accomplish. Under the roof of your Centennial building he will be taught to draw, and will be instructed in all that may aid him in serving your manufactures; and in your museum he will see illustrations of the principles that he learns applied to objects of utility. If your art manufactures are to prosper, if the fabrics which you weave and the objects which you make are to satisfy the educated-which they must do, if you desire to introduce them to the markets of the world-you must apply to them an ennobling art.

PAUPERISM AND ITS ALLIED OFFENSES.

HOWEVER closely we may apply statistical method to the

affairs of life, it is difficult to give it human interest, and especially is this true when human frailty and passion are the subjects of study. Shift its details as we may, yet we fail to reflect light beneath the surface, or render visible a single human motive. But we may go further, and create out of the tabulated acts of life absolute error, which is infinitely worse than failure, and which, like Mrs. Shelley's weird creation of Frankenstein, may lead beyond the bounds of human sympathy and action. Statistics which deal with human acts alone, cannot be interpreted by their own. light; but the varying phases of physical and mental life, the potent influence of environment, must each be given its due value. Thus to say that pauperism exists in a certain given ratio to the tax-paying population, is without meaning except to the taxpayer. The radical, physical and mental differences which exist between the householder and the pauper, the moral atmosphere that developes one and retards the growth of the other, are not in the least rendered clear by statistical knowledge. The statistical method of study has been laboriously followed for many years, yet

it is within a very recent period that the intimate relations existing between the perpetrator of the minor degrees of crime against property, the pauper and the habitual violator of the normal sexual relations, first were understood; and this knowledge was attained not by means of social statistics, but by a study of the laws of heredity. The tabulated array of social facts may be translated into other language than a mere numerical statement by viewing it in relation to the physiological and mental conditions of men. In these conditions may be found the laws in obedience to which. the components of the social fabric are defined in groups.

Pauperism, then, and its allied phases of crime, are not accidental circumstances in social organization. These offenses are the outcome of seemingly fixed laws, and the sequence of antecedent conditions, near or remote. Indeed, we must conceive that the evolution of society, both material and intellectual, is the result of forces acting uniformly and resulting in a continuous increment of growth; but, I believe we must also conceive that the same forces which tend to evolution in one direction tend to degeneracy in the opposite, just as the circumstances that favor the growth of some widely-branching oak enable it to over-shadow and thus retard the development of a younger comrade; or the same causes that result in a high barometer in one region produce a corresponding fall at another point. This may be corroborated to a certain extent by observing the action of some of the artificial laws which society enacts to favor its development. A protective tariff for instance, that favors the increase of some particular industry in one country must react unfavorably upon the same industry in another country. The laws by means of which society endeavors to protect itself from the pauper, favors rather than retards the growth of this social parasite. It is therefore more in harmony with what we know of the laws of human development to suppose that the pauper is himself the result of these laws, rather than that he is the outgrowth of special forces which tend to this retrograde condition.

The popular idea of a pauper is that of a man who will not work; and in law this popular notion is given practical force by making vagrancy a misdemeanor. But physically and mentally the pauper is one who cannot work; whose energies are insufficient to keep him up to the level of the average man, and who has no surplus vitality to expend in productive labor. Regarding the

ability of a man to provide for his natural wants as an evidence of a normal mental and physical life, an inherent deficiency in this ability is equally an evidence of abnormality. The typical pauper is, therefore, a diseased man. We can consider him in no other light and assign him his place as a fixed fact rather than as an accident in social order. If we analyze his character closely, every trait shows that in him we are dealing with an abnormal mind and body.

This becomes yet clearer when we observe that the different races of men and the different phases of social life produce different types of pauperism. Beginning at the lowest level of society, we see that pauperism disappears in the mass. The normal average is so low that it cannot be depressed and life sustained. From this point to the highest stage of social evolution the pauper, growing less and less able to keep himself upon the surface of society as a producer, conforms more closely to the type of his order. Tracing him through the descending phases of social development, he may be observed partaking of his social environment. We may therefore conceive it possible that a pauper who is the outgrowth of our own civilization may correspond to the self-sustaining average existing among the semi-barbarous, while one who is unable to exist higher than the level of pauperism in the latter community, may disappear as a pauper in the average mass of a savage tribe. Pauperism appears therefore as a relative quality; its force as a negative quantity increasing as the area of social activity enlarges.

We must, however, in this analysis, limit the term pauper. Its common applications include every one who requires support at the public expense. But many who were at one time producers may become broken down by bodily disease, or may be used up after a life-time of honorable toil. These are not in a true sense of the word "paupers;" they by toil have purchased the annuity of the poor, and have a right in old age, or in broken health, to demand of society food and shelter for the few years left to them. Cases such as these are inseparable from a high state of social tension. Society cannot exist without attrition in its complicated machinery, and social, like physical, hygiene cannot be preserved except by the elimination of used-up material. The honorable poor drop into the condition of public dependents as the debris of productive. labors; while the ideal pauper is the rejected material, the refuse, unfit to be assimilated by society in its productive movements.

Now the ideal pauper exists by a sort of divine right. Of all the various normal and abnormal, physical and mental conditions which may be transmitted by entailment, pauperism stands preeminent. As a moral disease it exceeds in the potency of its hereditary tendency all the more marked physical diseases. Of 615 pauper children in the various county almshouses in the state of New York in 1874, 5 per cent had pauper grandfathers, 7 per cent had grandmothers in the same condition, while of the fathers 17, and of the mothers 71 per cent were paupers.'

Men alone furnish the peculiar combination of depressed mental and physical energies necessary to constitute the ideal pauper. We may explain this in a general way by the great excess of physical energy and its accompanying mental conditions of man, as compared with woman, which are demanded by his coarse and heavy form of labor; while the other sex possessing the same radical errors are either able to maintain themselves by an allied offense in harmony with their sexual organism, or by marriage are partially, at least, placed beyond the requirements of self-support. But this view does not embrace an explanation of the entire phenomenon. The predominance of the male is a marked feature of alms-house population in childhood. Of 615 children in the almshouses of the State of New York, 58 per cent are males." The number of women to men for the year 1871, is as 100 is to 110 in the alms-houses of the same State. One of the conclusions Mr. Dugdale arrives at is, "that pauperism follows men more frequently than women," and for which I know of no explanation except that given above, but this is supplemented by the conclusion also arrived at by the same author that the "intermarried branches show a preponderance of pauperism" and "the illegitimate branches produce a preponderance of crime." Mr. Dugdale's conclusion, based upon 1200 cases more carefully analyzed than any others in the study of the natural history of crime, are very valuable; but it needs long-continued and minute physiological study to explain them. Omitting some which involve a partial repetition, they are as follows: "The different degrees of adult pauperism, in the main, are indications of waning vitality," and "tend to terminate in extinction."

1 "Pauper and Destitute Children," in Eighth Annual Report State Board of Charities. Albany, 1875.

2 State Board of Charities Report, 1875, p. 246.

3 Loc. cit. p. 162.

"The diseases which enter most largely in the production of pauperism are the result of sexual licentiousness."

"Pauperism in adult age, especially in the meridian of life, indicates a hereditary tendency."

"The youngest child has a tendency to become the pauper of the family."

It is by tracing the relations of pauperism to its allied social errors that we gain an insight into the nature of those links which bind together the different strata of social life, and reveals the fact that forces which seem to be exerted counter to each other spring from a common centre, diverge and yet produce a common result either for good or evil. We may gain a knowledge of social health by studying social disease. Physiology would to-day have many unexplored places, were it not for the aid given the scalpel and the vivisector by disease. Evidence exists that comes upon us with nearly the force of a revelation, that vital forces and functions which express the sum of life in the individual find an almost infinite imitation in the forces and actions which express the sum of the social fabric-just as the movements of one system of planets seem endlessly repeated through the starry infinity of heaven. We look upon pauperism, vagrancy and prostitution as evils, but we seem driven to the conclusion that they are evils in the sense that the perversion of a natural law or function in physical life is an evil. Evil as any of these errors may be, yet viewed in this light we perceive in them a beautiful harmony; that pauperism is a process of social excretion, a rejection of effete material, a force existing in society for the extinction of the unfit in order to permit the survival of the fittest; that vagrancy is but one stage of the process; that the sexual crime of women is a perversion of a natural function, the tendency to which finds its origin in the radical perversion of the normal energies which serve to keep the individual at an average level in active life, and that this perversion underlies. all these classes of crime.

It was in the relation of the social evil to pauperism that Mr. R. L. Dugdale first caught a glimpse of his law of criminal analogues.3 As Mr. Dugdale formulates it, the professional unchastity of women is the analogue of pauperism and crime in the males of the same

Loc. cit., p. 162.

5" Thirtieth Annual Report of the Prison Association of New York," p. 152.