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Honored Colleagues, -- It is thought that this opening address should present a single co-ordinating idea which shall manifest the logical and natural relations of our various subjects to each other and to social welfare. Men and women of varied talents and training, each an enthusiast in a single vocation, have joined for a week of Conference under the impulse of a common motive. This Conference mirrors the universal law of unity in variety, of specialization of function attended by reciprocal dependence in the organization of a community. It is desirable and necessary that we should cultivate our specialties: it is just as necessary that we should avoid the wastes and dissipation of aimless and mob-like effort.

Accept from one who is grateful beyond expression for this honor and opportunity a modest contribution to these deliberations, -- a contribution not of new ideas, but of a mode of organizing our multifarious interests about a common vital purpose.

Let our theme be "The Relation of Philanthropy to Social Order and Progress."

The word "philanthropy" is here used in the particular meaning, -- social sympathy expressed in the care of the dependent members of society, -- the physically, mentally, and morally defective. Among the "Three Reverences" of Goethe, it is that one which is shown in the downward look, which seeks for the essential signs of hope even in the lowest. "Social order" is a phrase chosen to indicate that arrangement of social activities which is adapted at a given hour to secure the normal satisfactions of the community. "Social progress" is intended to signify an absolute advance of the race in physical capacity, brain power, knowledge, invention, and ability to meet new demands of multiplying and refined desires.

My thesis is this ethical claim which requires rather illustration than argument: It is the duty of philanthropists, in the humane care of dependants, to aim at the furtherance of social order and social progress. This thesis is not a commonplace, universally accepted. It runs directly counter to certain ideals of some good men, and the moment the theory touches practical life it meets obstruction in the impulsiveness and stubborn traditionalism of charity. There are noble and amiable persons who do not believe in progress as defined, -- "the multiplication and elevation of desires and of the material means of their gratification." They believe in a few wants and a low degree of effort. There are also generous and sympathic folk who bitterly and persistently antagonize any attempt to inquire about the effect of charity upon the indigent or on society at large.

Therefore, my thesis requires defence; and, if it be accepted, it demands missionary zeal in its propagation. We may reiterate its substance in a different and more aggressive form. The supreme test of philanthropy is not found in the blind and instinctive satisfaction of a kind impulse, nor in the apparent comfort of dependent persons, but rather in the welfare of the community and of the future race. Deliberately, rationally, and with widest possible knowledge, we must try our success by this standard.

Not that we admit any real conflict between the welfare of the defective and the good of the community. We follow the logic of the doctrine of solidarity to its extreme limits, and admit that every human being, even criminals and idiots, are members of the social body. To wound them is to hurt all, and the loss of the least of them would be a loss of the whole human race.

But we know perfectly well that there is a deadly conflict between certain current methods of philanthropy and the common welfare. The agents of charity have during more than a thousand years poisoned the fountains of human life by false theories and methods of giving. This is the startling and discouraging discovery which every instructed philanthropist is sure to make at an early stage of his endeavor to help the weak and the wicked.

We shall rightly judge our own success and pass under the solemn verdict of posterity, not according to the numbers to whom we have furnished food, clothing, and shelter, but according to a very much higher and more exacting standard. Indeed, the statistics of population in our almshouses and orphanages may some day be cited as evidence of defects in our methods and in our civilization. The best proof of highest success would be given if we could turn our prisons into schools, our insane asylums into palaces of delight, our orphanages into factories or places of technical instruction.

The mitigation of misery has often been the most efficient cause of multiplying the hordes of the miserable. We may become so deeply absorbed in our cultivation of a little island of charity as to forget the rising tide of pauperism, insanity, and crime which threatens to overwhelm and engulf our civilization.

It is not wise to exaggerate. At this moment we cannot absolutely affirm a rapid increase of dependants and criminals on the basis of statistics. Nothing is gained by sensational interpretation of unreliable tables. But with the most scrupulous avoidance of spectacular representations the sober reality is enough to arouse our attention, sustain our vigilance, and demand more adequate methods.

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It is not the province of this Conference to discuss all social problems. Such questions as municipal administration and functions, international law, monopolies, trade-unions, and co-operation belong in assemblies specially devoted to these interesting topics. But it is our duty and our present task to consider the bearing of our own labors with the defective classes on the larger movements for betterment. From economist and politician we may learn the influence of industrial and legal movements on charity and correction; but, from our side, we may study the effect of relief and reform on the conditions of wage-workers, city populations, political control, and religious movements. We cannot isolate our labors from "those of our fellow-citizens.

Theory. -- It will be remembered that this Conference grew out of the Social Science Association, and for a time had no independent existence. This connection can never be broken. Our problems are social problems. Each one must see the place of his own work in the entire system; that is, we must acquire a theory of the situation.

Well did Dr. Felix Adler say: "Experience without theory is blind. Theory, it is true, without experience is without feet to stand on. But experience without the guiding and directing help of theory is without eyes to see." (1)

It is confessedly difficult to discover the law, the tendency, the goal, of a complicated social movement. But, unless we do succeed in this scientific quest, we are drifting, not navigating. Our efforts, however well meant, must be blind, contradictory, conflicting, and reciprocally destructive. (2) Millions of dollars and many good lives are wasted in this conflict of unscientific philanthropy, which grasps at passing shadows and straws and divides the benevolent. Social science is born when men consciously and intelligently grasp the purpose of their strivings and deliberately seek for guiding principles. Just at this point lies the difference between a savage and a civilized community. (3)

(3) See Ratzenhofer, "Die sociologische Erkenntniss," S. 244.

The Costs of Civilization. -- The progress of society is due to variation. A monotonous people makes no advance. The multiplication of numbers is not progress. The child imitates ancestors, and, grown to manhood, trains his offspring to follow the antique copy. It is the new kind of a plough, not the freshly painted plough, that marks a higher development of invention. It is the new kind of man which is the essential characteristic of a progressive epoch. But variation implies difference, inequality, and comparison. The evolution of a higher type is impossible without tension, struggle. The rewards must go to superior skill and intelligence, or we shall have mediocrity and degradation. This struggle of competition, which appears to be necessary to progress, implies some kind of rejection of those who cannot compete. The very means of progress become their destruction. The more rapid the movement, the more difficult is it for the slow and defective to find a place. In a certain sense we may regard pauperism and defect as part of the price paid for civilization.

Hence the gap in the Utopian reasoning of those amiable but visionary social doctors who scorn the slow and tedious methods of charity, and put contempt on the very name "philanthropy." Better, they tell us, with noble and fierce eloquence, to abolish poverty at once. Change the form of government, introduce a new industrial system, destroy the despotism of trade, "socialize" manufacture and agriculture, and we could soon dispense with prisons and orphanages. A student of the long processes of organic evolution may well doubt this splendid vision. He may enjoy the optimistic dream, but his sober judgment and his science forbid him to live in dreams. The causes of defect are not all in industry and in government. They exist under all modes of industry and government. They are largely biological, deep in our relations to nature. A swift and superficial change in law or modes of employing labor would not touch these causes. They would remain and be as active as before.

I am not making an argument against the single tax or socialism or any other scheme. It is my single purpose to indicate that under any form of economic and legal institutions some of the most powerful causes of degeneracy might still exist. If some form of socialism shall be adopted by our posterity, they will need all the knowledge we are gathering. Unquestionably, advance in medicine, surgery, sanitation, hand in hand with improved institutions for education and regulation, will gradually diminish the force which carries some members of the race downward. We rejoice in this prospect. We are working toward that brighter day. But we must not weaken our energy or lull our vigilance by excessive and irrational optimism.

It is safe to say that there is not now in sight any proposition for amelioration which would within a few generations give reasonable ground for dissolving the National Conference of Charities and Correction. We should all be glad to celebrate the death of all the institutions here represented if we could be assured they were or could be made superfluous.

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The Social Problem in its Elements. -- Practically, we must look in another direction for substantial and reasonable grounds of hope.

Assuming that we must long deal with a certain element of dependent persons, -- though a diminishing number, let us hope, -- what must we seek? (1) We must guarantee our altruism, that fine and delicate sentiment, ornament of humanity, flower of our ethical development, fruit of our religion. We cannot sacrifice social sympathy, tenderness, acute sensibility to suffering. We must not even think of going back to that savage and brutal state of heart in which our ancestors lived, in which children could beat out the brains of toothless parents, in which fathers and mothers could without a pang expose to vultures their deformed and feeble babes. Nor can we return to that stage of culture when society can pursue a policy of torture and extermination against criminals.

(2) But, on the other hand, we cannot permit the cost and burden of defect to oppress our culture without an effort to reduce the load. The wealth which goes to prisons, insane asylums, and almshouses, is needed for higher ends.

(3) We must resist, by all available means, the deterioration of the common stock, the corruption of blood, the curses of heredity. It must be included in our plan that more children will be born with large brains, sound nerves, good digestive organs, and love of independent struggle. We wish the parasitic strain, the neuropathic taint, the consumptive tendency, the foul disease, to die out.

These are social ends, and it is the duty of philanthropists to include them in every programme.

It is popularly supposed that this Conference is merely busy about Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano, -- half brutes, drunkards, and the unfit, -- with Ophelias, mad from grief, with Falstaff's crew of rowdies. At first sight the world sees about us the blind, the insane, the beggar. We scorn not the task, but we have in this work a wider vision.

Sir George Nicholls well said, "In every country, and in all states of society, destitution has existed, and from the nature of things ever will exist; and in the relative proportion which the destitute bear to the entire population, and in the manner in which this destitute class is dealt with, the general conditions of the whole in no small degree depend." (4)

Mrs. C. R. Lowell expressed our sentiment in the Fourteenth Conference: "I wish we could find a name which would cover the idea of good done to the whole community, to the doers as well as to others. I should very much like it if some idea of good citizenship, and of the duties due by and for citizens in mutual service, could be embodied in our name." (5)

Before we descend into the maze of debate and discussion, let us place in our hands a clew. Let us marshal our thoughts and new acquisitions of knowledge about a great, unifying, co-ordinating ideal. To discern the direction of the best and most instructed thought to sharpen our critical judgment of tendencies and recommendations, to remove inconsistencies and contradictions from our reasonings, let us consider certain teachings which run through the discussions of this week. Let us bring each section of our studies into the focus of this search-light and standard, -- the effect of a method on race welfare.

I. The discussions of our wardens and superintendents reveal a steadily growing tendency and disposition to bring reformatory methods to the test of race welfare.

Leaving capital punishment out of account for the moment, what is the aim of our present system? Does it not include two master purposes: (1) limitation and restriction of evil and destructive acts; (2) the reformation and education -- so far as possible -- of the criminal himself? It is no real kindness to any moral being to give him liberty to injure his neighbors without restraint, and without efforts to train him in social habits consistent with freedom.

Law itself, though conservative and suspicious of revolutionary change, begins to bend to the highest theory. In the place of a barbarian code and an absolute principle of vindictive justice the law gradually shapes itself to the truths of evolutionary science, and somewhat reluctantly lends its aid to the aims of the educator and to social selection.

Illustrations and evidence are easy to find and note. Take, for example, the probation system of Massachusetts, the conditional release, and the manual and technical schools of Elmira Reformatory. What is the new social purpose which dominates all the minor details of these advance movements? Simply this master idea: the adaptation of educable men to a place in competitive society.

But all reformatories and prisons discern before long -- contrary to the visionary prospects of uninstructed sentimentalism -- that there is a certain refractory element which never in this world can be fitted into competitive society.

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The method of test and discovery lies in a reasonable series of carefully devised experiments of management, -- the mark system, the indefinite sentence, and conditional parole. Under this plan the prisoner demonstrates his capacity of body, intellect, and character by his own conduct. All arbitrary and capricious standards are excluded. The man pronounces his own verdict in the product of his industry and in the history of his daily acts.

When the demonstration is complete and the repeater of crime has written his sentence of incapacity for freedom, another principle of law comes into view, -- the "progressive sentence." Deep down in this law is a social purpose of conscious selection. It is not retaliatory and blindly instinctive, it is not a blood-thirsty, savage growl for the life of a fellow-man; but it is a slowly acquired conviction, clarified by science, that our duty to posterity demands of us, in the measure of our power, the limitation of the line of criminals. Crime is not inherited but the defect which makes a criminal career probable may be inherited. Crime is taught, and the progressive sentence cuts off the number of instructors in the craft.

But the custodial confinement of the criminal does not exclude education. Even in the penitentiary we know no absolutely "incorrigible" class. To the end of his life the aged convict is still a pupil. So far as he has capacity, the State seeks to give him regular industry, books, teachers, chaplains, and all that is essential to make him a free man. This mortal life is too short, and our imperfect pedagogy is too defective, to let us know all that can be accomplished.

II. Defectives. -- Moving across the uncertain and shadowy borderland between crime and defect, we come to the region of the insane. Here, again, the social ends of education and selection are coming to control and direct all the parts and details of the systems of care. Sometimes one object is more conspicuous, and then the other; but in no single case is either excluded. So long as there is hope of cure, our States are lavish in expenditure. In those earlier years before alienists told us frankly that the sanguine hopes of restoring the chronic insane to normal health rested on a false basis of statistics and prognosis, our States invested fabulous sums in hospitals for those bereft of reason. The indigent shared with the wealthy in this bounty and eager expenditure.

But, when the sad and disappointing truth slowly spread over the professional and public mind, men began to think of prevention, of child-care, and of safe and humane custody. Not that any known means of care is neglected. Hope, cheer, and education are still provided for those who wearily wait in the dim starlight for the flash of restored reason.

In the case of the feeble-minded the principle of social selection may be said to control all methods. Everything is subordinated to the end of closing out the stock of a hopelessly degenerate line. We sometimes use the harsh word "extermination." But our system is based on an absolutely different motive from that which inspired the ancient and savage customs of infanticide and exposure. It is beautiful, though pathetic, to move about with the teachers of an asylum for the feeble-minded. Here all are "children," even when the wrinkles and stoop and grayness of advanced years betoken passage to adult life.

In this field we have an illustration of the social value of statistics and records which some so-called "practical" people affect to despise. The studies of families of degenerates in New York and Indiana may be cited as typical examples of the importance of exact and scientific histories of the wards of society, if we are to guide legislation by facts rather than by hasty guesses and crude speculation.

These studies seem at this hour to show us plainly that a vigorous policy of segregation of pronounced degenerates for two or three generations would reduce the defective stock to fairly manageable proportions. It must be remembered that degeneracy assumes many forms, and may appear in the various children of the same parents as inebriety, crime, insanity, idiocy, or mere futility. So closely are all members and institutions of society organically bound together that the treatment of the feeble-minded must affect every problem of poor relief, crime, insanity, intemperance.

Yet, while we aim at social selection by custody in asylums, we care for the individual. The imbecile is educated, as far as his slow brain can go, as thoroughly as the university candidate for the doctorate. Indeed, certain problems of the highest educational process can be studied in the school for the feeble-minded as in no other place. Who shall say in advance of trial that these institutions may not in the end contribute more to science and to the art of pedagogy than they have ever cost the States which support them ! Nothing is made in vain. No person is to be cast into the rubbish heap and declared useless. We must know more and delve deeper before we pronounce on that subject. Meantime we protect future society by providing that none of these unhappy children shall ever become parents, and yet that they shall be given, as far as possible, the rational pleasure and education of regular productive industry and instruction and social fellowship, not without gleams of happiness breaking through rifts in the clouds.

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III. Relief. -- In the field of relief we daily touch the border-line which divides philanthropy from the labor movement. Here is need to apply with utmost caution and rigor our test of social welfare. Charity workers and administrators of public funds and pensions are under solemn obligations to study the effect of their modes of relief on the aggressive, independent, self-reliant multitude of wage-earners. There is at this point such conflict of supposed interests, such partisan passion, such failure to make due distinctions, that there is a serious danger of impeding and hurting the labor movement, the hope of the majority of modern urban populations.

I must be content with a few illustrations. The studies of Charles Booth in East and South London have given the world a masterly analysis of the stratification of a city population according to their economic ability. Some such analysis must be the basis for advance in relief work. To the superficial and careless citizen the "poor" are all very much alike. One common character is ascribed to them. This superficiality of analysis is fatal to precision and wisdom in treatment. The vast majority of our modern populations have at last been caught up in the current of progress. They have an increasing money income, a longer average life, fewer days of sickness, better morals, and a higher education than the industrial populations of any previous century. For most men the inventions of machinery, and the improved organization of industry, trade, and education, have opened a new and higher world. Their very unrest, ambition, and clamorous demands are hopeful. Their higher standards of life fill them with an invincible determination to erect a dyke against the floods which threaten that standard. The universal possession of suffrage practically makes united industrial masters of the government.

But economically, physically, intellectually, and morally beneath the self-supporting industrial class is a struggling multitude who cannot share in the dearly bought advantages of the strong. These, in general, not counting exceptions, are the people who are the habitual care of the agents of public and private relief. Let us call this multitude the "Dependants." But this word "Dependants" is too vague and large for accurate use. Coming closer to the clinging, beseeching thing, we discover one line of cleavage which at least helps us a little way, -- the dividing line between the employable and the unemployable, to borrow a graphic phrase of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

The only point which the limits of my theme and time permit me even to suggest for reflection and discussion is this: How can we apply the principles of selection and education to this motley multitude of the unemployable, and what will be the effect of our policy on the employable? A mere hint must suffice.

It is becoming apparent, is it not, that vast numbers of the dependants are unemployable because they have no skill. That is what we are told by the superintendents of reformatories and visitors of associated charities. There are men who are strong and willing, but awkward. They have from childhood up had no organization of nervous and muscular system in correlation with eye and ear and brain. They have never learned the alphabet of the language of the mechanic crafts. The ancient apprenticeship system furnished a school for technical training. Our system of division of labor and specialized machine and factory industry has made it impossible to give a broad discipline of the whole man in a shop. If a boy goes early to a machine, it lames and distorts him to its own ends.

Thus our cities have, with every change of age and method, thrown upon them a considerable number of dwarfed and helpless men who know not what to do and none can tell them. To offer these a free bureau of employment is a mockery. Their need lies deeper and goes back further. The world is waking to the fact that many of the unemployable might, by a suitable early education, have been made employable.

But still our educational process is sternly critical. The motley crowd of the unemployable separates even in the school into two companies, with a ragged fringe of shreds half crossing the gap. In our urban population we find only too many who cannot be trained for competitive industry, -- that kind of industry which lifts the strong and well-endowed, but mercilessly rejects the incapable. It is quite certain that many of these incapables might at an earlier stage have been raised to the plane of contest. But now it is too late; and in the best case some will not be able to take the degree of training which will enable them to cope with the advanced demands of an age which runs by steam and talks by lightning.

An earlier or a coarser age knew well what to do with this residuum, -- they were food for powder or were left to perish. Natural selection killed them, and religion buried them, knowing not what else to do. Modern peoples are making slight and uncertain experiments with various kinds of agricultural colonies. But agricultural colonies are only another form of social selection of the unfit for humane treatment and painless death. They continue the process of training and classification; but in the last analysis they have proved asylums for the futile residuum, for those who cannot find a place in the whirling world of competition. The next step seems to be the final segregation of the incapable in an environment suitable to their condition.

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What is the effect on the self-supporting working people of the outdoor relief given to these unemployable? That is a problem we have not yet dared to face. Perhaps economic and statistical science is not yet able to solve it. But there are very competent economists who repeat to-day the essential argument of Thomas Chalmers: Outdoor relief, in the form of a subsidy to the feeble, is a curse to the wage-worker.

It may be found that much of our outdoor relief is just an indirect way of hiring people, who cannot produce their maintenance, to underbid workingmen in the market. If this be found true, social duty is clear: remove the incapable to non-competing colonies and permit the capable to maintain their standard of life without the weight of this competition about their necks. This plan, so far as I can see, would not add to the present burden, since we are already partly supporting them by an enormous pension without control of their labor or conduct. In agricultural self-supporting colonies, under State direction, they might be made more nearly capable of producing their maintenance than now; and it is certain that not so much of the money would go to liquor, tobacco, or sensual vice. But here again the breeder's principle of artificial selection must be rigorously applied; there must be no infants in these colonies of the residuum. The colony must not become a nursery of the incompetent.

IV. Child-saving. These methods are, at first sight, educational. For the most part the task is simple and hopeful: the homeless child is taken to a childless home, or to family care where love makes room for one more object of mercy and hope. Where a good home has been discovered, philanthropy has no further duty; the ordinary social forces take charge of the case. The old sad history is forgotten; with a new home begin new memories and a new career.

But child-saving is complicated by the intrusion of the incapable and the degenerate and perverted. Just as we were singing the triumph of environment over heredity, the stormy straits of adolescence had to be crossed, and some vicious ancestral trait burst through the weak film of acquired habit. In one awful moment we stood face to face with an ancient foe.

It may not be often, but this happens. Even in this most hopeful form of philanthropy, we come upon the necessity of making a choice between education and sequestration. Only too many examples could be given. The placing-out system rarely has to confess defect; but in these rare and tragical cases it meets its Waterloo. The institution and the colony of the unfit here are justified. Social selection makes education temporarily, for this mortal life, subordinate. A mastery of the principle of selection will help to solve the debated problem of the place of the institution in child-saving work. I venture the suggestion that the dispute could be settled in most cases of doubt by the physical examination of a competent medical officer.

V. Immigration. We are to discuss immigration. The central idea here is national participation in the culture of the human race. In great measure each nation produces degenerates by its own defects or neglects. Justice requires that to each shall be rendered his own. It is reasonable to suppose that we are doing England and Italy no real kindness by helping them to postpone necessary domestic reforms because it is easy to transport their home-made criminals and insane and feeble-minded. Their relief would be temporary, while the causes persist; and our damage will last for generations. The blending of healthy and similar peoples is often the beginning of a superior race, and social selection is promoted by that process.

But the intermarriage of a superior people with a very inferior people cannot, I think, be shown to have a good issue. Certainly, every atom of vicious and degenerate blood is poison in our veins. Our frontier is the line of battle against elements whose admission would be an occasion for which our descendants may curse us.

VI. In Charity Organization, city or State, all these problems come, one by one and all together, under daily review. But it is in these offices of central supervision and administration that we can hope to marshal and continue the agencies of betterment.

RÉSUMÉ AND CONCLUSION.

Education and Selection. -- In all our institutions of charity and correction we are employing, more or less consciously and intelligently, two principal instruments or methods. We are educating the educable; and we are seeking to eliminate, as far as possible, the depressing influence and the propagation of those who cannot be fitted for competitive life.

This does not imply that we exclude education from the care of those who are too feeble or deformed for the normal struggle of life. The home of the feeble-minded, even the asylum for lifelong State custody of irresponsible women, is still a school, and the educational process continues to that point where our dim lamps flicker, and the angels on the luminous side have their brighter lamps ready to guide the little pilgrim into the unseen. We believe that even the recidivist of the penitentiary is capable of learning lessons which may bear fruit in a more hospitable spiritual climate. Despair closes no prospect.

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And yet for earthly and social purposes our immediate method must be controlled by the clear and definite purpose of restricting, even if we cannot totally eliminate, the depressing element of the population. The effect which is incidental to confinement in prisons, asylums for the insane, homes for the feeble-minded, retreats for inebriates, will more and more be accepted deliberately as a rational object of legislation and administration. When society is duly impressed with the moral obligation to foster the health and happiness of posterity, we may hope for changes in customs, habits, and treatment of the inefficient. Beginning with the families of highest character, we may hope to see multiplied instances of women and men -- rarely men -- refusing to marry and have children, when they can foresee weakness and degeneracy in their possible offspring. Public opinion will find or provide something like mediaeval cloisters for those who dedicate their short lives of sickness to holy retirement rather than menace the future good of mankind.

Beginning with those most manifestly unfit for parenthood, the State will extend its custody to other classes, with a cautious reserve of the rights of citizens, and a conservative use of the power to deprive of liberty.

Education and Amelioration of Conditions. -- But we have not yet approached the limit of social power to limit the perpetuation of defect by other means. Public opinion will not sanction any wholesale scheme of segregation and custody until we have exploited the entire resources of sanitary science, improved administration, and of our public and private school system. We dare not presume to affirm that many children of the "slums" are unfit for freedom unless we give them, what many now do not have, a fair chance to prove what is in them. Many cases of consumption, perhaps all, are due to preventable contagion rather than to heredity.

Building and sanitary regulations of dwellings may obliterate many of the causes of debility and insanity which we have hastily ascribed to heredity. Sensuality itself, one of the most important springs of pauperism, may be materially reduced by awakening in the meagre lives of poor girls and boys diverting and competing spiritual interests of learning and of play which will contest the field with animal appetite.

The Social Settlement movement is still very young. No living man is prophet competent to forecast its future discoveries and influence. We do not yet imagine the transforming and transfiguring power latent in the Church. We cannot now foretell the changes, almost miraculous, which will occur in the moral habits, the interests, and the physical condition of the abject poor, when a divided Church shall agree to co-operate, and when a federation of spiritual enthusiasts shall come into the place of our present chaos and neglect in municipal life. We cannot yet foresee the happy improvement in foods, drainage, plumbing, management of contagious disease, sewerage, and schools which will be granted unto city governments, purified by the civil service reform.

Education and selection are not antagonistic: they are but two aspects of one vast and world-wide movement of the progressive nations.

Meantime we seek to develop, with larger resources of the special sciences, and with wider practical experience, the work of our fathers. There is one mind and one spirit in history, and one purpose toward which the whole creation moves.

That purpose, we reverently believe, is good. Without professions of an exhaustive knowledge of God, we humbly and lovingly enter upon his plans of mercy and progressive unfolding of good and truth, and ask his counsels in the deliberations of this week. These studies we dedicate to our heavenly Father and to his children.