The succeeding summer being long and fruitful, the cats thrived well, and the next autumn there were 50,000 cats on the island, and as there was but forage enough to winter 10,000 cats, 40,000 must starve during the coming winter, unless fed. Again the Queen taxed her people, and the cats were saved; but, to the amazement of the Queen and her little people, the next autumn brought 100,000 hungry cats to be fed, and it had come to a point where either the people or the cats must starve.
With grief, the Queen decided in favor of the people, for it was evident that, if the people were allowed to starve to save the cats, the cats also would starve without the people. That year, 90,000 cats starved to death on the island.
Thus, the good Queen's well-meant charity, intended to save 10,000 cats from starving to death, finally resulted in 90,000 cats starving to death. Actually, her attempt to lessen cat misery multiplied that misery nine-fold.
Now, what was true of those cats applies with exactly equal truth to the rearing of paupers and incompetents in times of peace.
In all the countries of the civilized world today, there are institutions for rearing and educating idiots. Sometimes, a section of an idiot's skull is cut out, and the skull trepanned in order to give his little brain room to expand. In this way, an idiot, incapable of feeding himself, may develop intelligence enough to vote, under the instruction of the ward-heeler, or he may even develop into a public expounder of the beauties of defenselessness as a safeguard against war.
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:—