normal tendency to physical exertion be blunted by errors of surroundings, while the forces of heredity tend in the opposite direction. We perceive in this a fact of terrible significance. This is the process of manufacturing the pauper, the tramp and the prostitute, out of the raw material of virtue and industry. Aside from physical states, we must regard entailed peculiarities as latent tendencies, not as existing conditions during this period of plasticity. Thus it is that the errors of environment may obliterate inherited tendencies to virtue and industry. Taking into consideration the vast number of children of industrious parentage yearly thrown into alms-houses through the United States, we may form. an idea of the importance of this matter of environment. While these errors of environment may prevent sustained and well directed industry in those of normal tendencies exposed to its influence, yet we must concede to the force of hereditary influences that transcend the misfortunes of one generation; therefore while the males so exposed, instead of drifting into inert pauperism, recruit the ranks of the active criminals, the females as the natural result of their moral atmosphere become sexual criminals, but without the irreclaimable tendencies of those whose defects are the result of both heredity and surroundings. This is the class probably of whom Mr. Dugdale says that early marriage tends to extinguish this offense.10

It is evident, and it has for some time been acted upon, that children who are dependent upon the state for support, if they are to be preserved from the doom of pauperism and moral degradation, must not be reared in the society of adults of their own class. We have in the tramp and vagrant essentially distinct beings from the pauper. They seem to be, in their own types, as wide a departure from the average man as the pauper is in his; but they present many traits which lead to the conclusion that they are expressions of the same forces. In the aversion to fixed abodes and continuous labor, in the disposition to gain an existence without adequate return, and the mental apathy that retards all expression of the moral feelings, we perceive characteristics that link tramp and pauper to the class of effete humanity. While they exhibit equal repugnance to labor, yet the tramp is a man of activity, of events. He is not deficient in bodily powers; but this power is expended in the direction of his predominant trait-his nomadic 10 Loc. cit p. 152.

tendency. He will work intermittently rather than starve— which cannot be said of the pauper-but he had also rather beg than work. The pauper exists wherever there is a civilization capable of rising above him; while the tramp is found only amid a civilization with a surplus of its products, in a society of the greatest tension. The one is fixed like a barnacle, the mess-mate of his productive brother the laborer, and by his waning energies restricted to the life of a social parasite; the other is a scavenger, restless, migratory, always in the rear, never in the van of the movement of population.

Heredity, atavism and intermarriage produce the same phenomena in one as the other; and whether they are the product of the same factors or not, they are amenable to the same vital laws. There is, however, this radical difference, that, while pauperism exists with a sort of cumulative force from childhood to old age, the tramp disappears at the two extremes of life, existing germ-like in the one, vanishing with the decline of his vital powers in the pauperism of the other. The nomadism of the tramp consumes totally the energies of the productive period of life. In this sense he is a criminal with the pauper, and his unchaste sister; but it is rare that he is engaged in crime, except the minor offenses against property. The habitual criminal is gregarious, the tramp is solitary and nomadic. It is not by the force of morality that he abstains from crime, but he expends his vigor in the direction of his mental characteristic, and the lighter shades of crime in which he indulges are those that coincide with his ruling traits.

The type of trampism prevails only among men more sharply defined than even pauperism. In the great army of tramps it is rarely that a woman is seen who exhibits the taint of nomadism in full force. Sink as low as she may, woman reveals the dominant force of sex in finer lines than man; her mental and physical errors coincide in direction with that of a force more powerful than heredity or environment. Since we have reason to regard the mental anatomy of both sexes as the direct and reflex results of governing physical traits, we perceive how widely separated she must be from many of the errors common to men. Sturdy, brutalized self-reliance upon thews and muscle, solitary and uncompanionable, wandering with aimless toil, are the traits of the tramp, each of which is opposed to the mental and organic expression of sex in women. From the absence of mental states which arise

from the consciousness of masterful strength, her offenses are social; she sins in company, and rejects those errors that shut her out from fellowship and aid. When tramp-women are met with they are usually attendant at the heels of sturdy men. They seem dejected, as if they were benumbed in will—an incarnation of misery, moving against the current of natural energies in obedience to the organic law of man's physical mastership.

If there has been any truth brought out in the course of this paper upon the physiology of crime, it is this: That entailed tendencies to crime seek an outlet in the direction of the physical and mental characteristics of the individual. With this in view, we may understand the extent to which this nomadism among a civilized people exists at the expense of physical qualities not possessed by average women.

Moreover, woman exceeds man outwardly as reflexions from her inner life. She, with eyes innately fashioned to receive the impressions of the lights rather than the shadows of life, sees harmonies, beauties and colors, that are invisible to man with his coarser vision. This she possesses without the refinement of education. The hard, prosaic life of the tramp is constantly revealing vivid contrasts with the brighter and better life around her; she follows her nomadism surrounded by points of counter attraction, having intensified effect by reason of exerting their force in harmony with her moral nature, which seems to exist too radically to be disturbed by even the full expression of an abnormal life.

Trampism and the more serious offense of women against the purity and dignity of their sex, are errors which beset the most active period of life. We rarely meet the aged and broken-down tramp; it is still more rare to meet with the aged woman who is holding her place in the ranks of her fallen sisters. Dr. Sanger gives the average life of public women at about four years, but he commits a grave mistake in explaining this by excessive mortality. They, instead of disappearing in death, undergo a social metamorphosis. Sickness and a decline in physical energy, the result of dissipation or age, are conditions which force a large percentage into pauperism. A very large number marry, and are in this manner either temporarily or permanently restored to a normal sexual life. Mr. Dugdale assigns to matrimony great value as a reforming agent among this class, believing that an early marriage may preserve a woman from sexual crime in opposition even to the force

of environment. According to this author there is a strong disposition among women so rescued to drift into pauperism while under the disabilities incident to child-bearing or from desertion. The fact, that by a well recognized social force the career of this class may be interrupted in the direction of one crime, only that they may drift the more easily toward an allied offense, is evidence. of the strongest nature of both the truth of criminal equivalents and that in this class of women we are dealing, not with accidental social conditions, but with profound physical and mental inherent errors which lead inevitably toward one or the other of the crimes here studied. And here may be traced an interesting parallelism between this group of crime in one sex, and the more serious phases of crime among men. We find one group beginning and ending in pauperism. Its meridianal strength and fervor never attains greater force than the sexual crime of one sex and the trampism of the other. Its beginning, full onset and decline are beneath the physical energies demanded by the simplest form of the active criminal career. And yet the more potent energies of the active criminal life exhibit the same stages of incipiency, full activity and decline. It begins in the lighter shades of offense against property, culminates in grave forms of crime against persons and property, and terminates at old age in the phases of crime that characterized the first period." It is by such a glimpse as this of the working of an infinite order in the field of human existence, which many suppose to be the scene of the spasmodic operations of evil, that we are entitled to hope for a possible redemption of many in the generations to come from the conditions of vice. This is a legitimate hope to entertain from the advances that scientific sociology is nearly certain to make in the future. Much might be done from what we know even now, if we were to recognize human nature as rather the exalted expression of divine law, than as simply a part of creation to be inexorably cursed or infinitely blessed.

Trampism in the other sex conforms to the same law in its beginning, acme and decline. Without regarding the relations between trampism and pauperism as in any manner those of cause and effect, we may yet look upon the latter, for the sake of illustration, as holding the attitude of a foster-parent to the on-coming generations of tramps. The child-tramp, replete with the taint of

" Popular Science Monthly, Jan., 1876, p. 334. "Relations of Women to Crime."

nomadism, is reared in the alms-house. His mental and physical horizon, at the time of greatest receptivity, is bound down by the torpidity of the pauper. Trampism after this is his best expression of manhood. Oftentimes of great endurance and sturdy of limb, he is without the enegy of continuous labor. After expending all there is of manhood in aimless wandering, he disappears in the obscurity of pauperism. He is the father of children who are either tramps, paupers or hopeless prostitutes. His life defines the lines of their lives with the force of heredity, environment and education. He is the human atom that acts as the common carrier of infectious diseases. He carries with him as a badge of usefulness, as an indication of the motive of his existence in the order of nature, the forces of extinction. He, his sister and the torpid pauper, seem to exist in an atmosphere of forces that tend to total obliteration-an extinction of the unfit, in order to give full scope for the survival of fitness in a purer and better type; an elimination of effete human beings for the sake of social health. ELY VAN DE WARKER.

THE

WISDOM IN CHARITY.1

`HE open hand must be guided by the open eye. The impulse of pity, or compassion for suffering, belongs to every wellordered mind; but, like every other impulse, taken by itself alone, it is blind and idiotic. Unable to protect itself against imposition, unable also to discriminate and adapt its relief to the various conditions of actual helplessness, it flings its resources abroad at haphazard, and gushes itself to death.

We think of the All-perfect as a being in whom pure good-will is in harmony with absolute reason. "God is love;" but also "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." His goodness is wisdom; His wisdom is goodness. Human charity, then, is undivine when it is unwise-when it acts in the dark, or without the guidance and restraint of good sense. To suppose there is any

1 A paper read before the Social Science Association of Philadelphia, December 7th.