relative influences of heredity and environment in determining the status of the individual. This knowledge has led us to a belief in men.

Earlier beliefs conceived of the majority of men as utterly depraved. Some indeed were among the elect, but the remainder, born to the lowest depths of the social gehenna, were outcasts and pariahs, helpless in this world and hopeless in the next. This doctrine of total depravity set at nought all progressive effort. Here stands a man—society has called him a criminal. Last year he attempted to steal an automobile, less than three weeks after his release from serving a two-year sentence for grand larceny. To-day he is in court again, charged with entering a lodging house and stealing three pairs of trousers and an overcoat. The man is on trial for burglary—what shall be the social verdict regarding him?

“Alas,” mourns the advocate of total depravity, “God so made him. It is not our right to interfere.”

“Wait,” says the social scientist, “until I investigate the case.”

The case is held over while the scientist makes his investigation. After careful inquiry, he reports that the young man’s criminal record began at the age of nine, when he was arrested for stealing bananas from a freight car. Locked up with older criminals, he soon learned their tricks. He was “nimble” and could “handle himself,” so his prison mates taught him the science of pocket picking, and initiated him into the gentle art of “shop lifting.” He was released, after two months of this schooling, and slipping out into the big, black city, he tried an experiment. Succeeding, he tried again, and yet again. Before the month was out, he was detected stealing a silk handkerchief, and was back in prison. There his education was perfected, and he entered the world to try once more. From the world to jail, from jail to the world—this boy’s life history from the age of nine, had been one long attempt to learn his trade; fortunately or unfortunately, he was somewhat of a bungler, and sooner or later he was always caught.

When he was a boy, he sneaked up a dingy court, and three pairs of dirty stairs to a landing where, in the rear of a battered tenement, was an abode which he had been taught to call home. His father, a dock laborer, earned, on the average, about $300 a year. Sometimes he worked steadily, day and night, for a week, and earned $25 or $30; then there would be no work for ten days or perhaps two weeks; the money would run out; the grocer would refuse credit; and the family would be hungry. It was during one of these hungry intervals that the nine-year-old urchin made his descent on the bananas in the freight car, and received his first jail sentence.

His mother, good hearted but woefully ignorant, made the best of things, taking in washing, doing odd jobs here and there, tending to her children, when opportunity offered, and at other times letting them run the streets.

“There,” concludes the social scientist, “is the story of that boy’s life. His only picture of manhood is an inefficient father who cannot earn enough to support his family; his concept of a mother expresses itself in good hearted ignorance; his view of society has been secured from the rear of a shabby tenement, the curb of a narrow street and a cell in the county jail. The seed bed has been neither prepared, watered, nor tended, and the young shoot has grown wild.”

The social scientist has not been content with an analysis of social maladjustment; going further, he has transplanted the young shoots from the defective seed bed to better ground. Dr. Bernardo organized a system for taking the boy criminals out of the slums of English cities, and sending them to farms in Australia, South Africa and Canada. Nearly 50,000 boys have been thus disposed of. Though in their home cities many of them had already entered a criminal life, in their new surroundings less than two per cent. of them showed any tendency to revert to their former criminal practices. A little tending and transplanting into a congenial environment, proved the salvation of these boys, who would otherwise have thronged the jails of England.

Careful analysis has convinced the social scientist that, in the absence of malformation of the brain, or of some other physical defect, the average man is largely made by his environment. As serious physical defect is quite rare, being present in less than five per cent. of the population; and as only a small percentage of the population, perhaps two or three per cent., is above the average in ability, more than nine-tenths of the people remain average—shaped by their environment; capable of good or of evil, according as the good or evil forces of society influence their youth and early maturity.

The eighteenth century philosophers had embodied the same conclusion in the doctrine that all men are created free and equal. Victor Hugo, in the first half of the nineteenth century, based most of his inspiring novels on the theory that in every man there is a divine spark—a conscience—which will be developed by a good environment or crushed and blackened by a bad one.

Each year added new proofs of the theory of universal capacity, until Ward was able to write his Applied Sociology, demonstrating that opportunity is the key-note of social progress.[16] For, says he, up to the present time nine-tenths of the men, and ten-tenths of the women (nineteen twentieths of society) have been denied a legitimate opportunity for development. Grant this opportunity, and at once, without any change in hereditary characteristics, you can increase, nineteen fold, the achievements of society.

Ward’s estimate may be or may not be exactly correct. His contention that universalized opportunity would greatly augment social achievement is, however, fundamentally sound. Social Adjustment aims, through the shaping social institutions, to provide every individual with an opportunity to secure a strong body, a trained mind, an aggressive attitude, the power of concentration, and the vision of a goal toward which he is working.[17] In short, the object of Social Adjustment is the provision of universal opportunity.

The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear many a gem of purest ray serene. Even the most gifted individual, thrown into an adverse environment, will either fail utterly to develop his powers, or else will develop them so incompletely that they can never come to their full fruition. Thomas A. Edison cast away on an island in the South Pacific would be useless to his fellows. Abraham Lincoln, living among the Apache Indians, would have left small impress on the world. A sculptor, to be really great, must go to Rome, because it is in Rome that the great works of sculptured art are to be found. It is in Rome, furthermore, that the great sculptors work and teach. A lawyer can scarcely achieve distinction while practicing in a backwoods county court, nor can a surgeon remain proficient in his science unless he keep in constant touch with the world of surgery. “I must go to the city,” cried a woman with an unusual voice. “Here in the country I can sing, but I cannot study music.” She must, of necessity, go to the city because in the city alone exists the stimulus and the example which