The most common of all errors of conviction is the belief that knowledge of right-doing necessarily leads us to do right. But the truth is, that we are mainly guided by sentiment, even when it is diametrically opposed to our knowledge of right. No branch of our learning is more strongly fortified by facts of experience than that thoroughbred animals cannot be bred from scrub stock; that superior types of dogs cannot be bred from mongrels; that a fast trotting-horse is never sired by a Mexican burro or foaled by a heavy draughtmare.
We know absolutely that identically the same laws govern the breeding both of human beings and of the lower animals, and that exactly according to the seed sown will the fruit be. If sentiment leads us to sow tares among the wheat, we inevitably injure the wheat. No breeder of the lower animals would, from sentimental considerations, employ inferior types for his purposes.
With human growth, just as with the growth of vegetation in forest and field, there is only a certain limited amount of room in the sun, and a certain limited amount of nourishment and moisture in the soil. When charity aids an inferior type to secure a plot of earth and a plot of sky, it can do so only at the expense of some better type, which would otherwise have conquered the spaces for itself, had not the inferior specimen had charity as an ally.
Apropos of this philosophy, I quote the following from an article in _Science_ by G. H. Parker, Professor of Zoölogy, of Harvard:--
"_Thus asylums, retreats, hospitals, and so forth, have been established by private munificence or public grants. More or less under the protection of these institutions has grown up a body of semi-dependents and defectives whose increase it is that excites the apprehension of the eugenists. That in the past such individuals have always formed a part of our race cannot be doubted, but that they ever showed a tendency to increase comparable with what seems to be occurring at present is highly improbable. The occasion of this increase is not, in my opinion, merely the exigencies of modern civilization; it is at least in part due to the immense spread of humanitarian activities which have characterized the last century of our civilization._"