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Allied to craving on the one hand and to lack of judgment on the other are gambling and speculation, of which Mr. Booth says that they are irrepressible and only to be stopped by changing human nature. In the San Francisco almshouse were found several working women whose savings had all gone in speculation in mining stocks, and among the men a considerably larger number. Betting on the races, buying lottery tickets, and gambling may not appear in the tabulated causes of poverty, but like drink they consume a large portion of the margin which would serve to lift the family out of poverty.

Shiftlessness and inefficiency, the last of the personal characteristics to which special reference need be made, is due to a variety of defects: it may be lack of judgment, stupidity, lack of ambition; in not a few cases to lack of proper training. Often it seems to be the manifestation of undervitalization simply, which in turn may go back to bad heredity, sickness, malnutrition, or bad habits. Whatever its origin, it manifests itself in general incompetence, in lack of the New England faculty of getting along, in want of persistence, in a chronic "ill-luck." A Boston district agent well describes these general incompetents: --

"They are not intelligent enough or strong enough or skilful enough or energetic enough to do work that employers can afford to pay a living wage for or to manage their own income in such a fashion as to make both ends meet; the men and women who are unable to do the simplest thing efficiently, who are unable to spend a single dollar wisely; the men and women who go 'slatting' through life, who are always thinking they can do what they cannot do, or who do not half try to do the things they are set to do -- these are society's burden." (78)

As we have already pointed out in discussing unemployment, the tendency of intermittent and irregular work is to produce a progressive deterioration. The weightiest charge which many vagabonds might bring against the modern industrial organization is that they have become what they are through the effect of involuntary idleness; for idleness, voluntary or involuntary, tends to produce a degeneration, physical, mental, and moral, which perpetuates the condition that begets it. Besides intermittent labor, none of the causes of inefficiency, not even sickness, says Professor Devine, is so important as defective education -- the entire lack of training for some and the wrong kind of training for others. (79)

Thus far we have not needed to inquire whether the evil propensities and bad habits which result in degeneration have come through free choice on the part of the individual, or have been the result of foreordination in the theological or the scientific sense of the term. We have been concerned simply with their interactions and their effects. Ignoring all discussion as to the freedom of the will in any absolute sense of the term, it is our present business to trace causes just as far as they are found to be traceable. As an insurance company is justified in refusing to take a risk upon the life of a man who comes of a sickly family, or is engaged in some peculiarly dangerous occupation, so the student of social science is justified in concluding that certain influences of heredity and environment have an effect upon the character of the individual that is often manifest, and that is frequently to some extent measurable.

From the time of birth, or even from the time of conception, the characteristics of race and of sex are fixed; and these are not without influence on the industrial history of the individual, as our tables show. Beyond this, every man has his own individuality -- the combination of physical and mental peculiarities which make him a different individual from every other. Since, by the law of sex, he has twice as many ancestors as his father or mother had, he could inherit anything which either of them had received. His share from both will form a sort of mosaic, composed of their species and race characters added together and divided by two, plus an approximate half of the personal peculiarities of each.

Dr. David Starr Jordan, in a chapter entitled "The Heredity of Richard Roe," has concisely and admirably stated what is known of heredity, and we shall quote from him certain paragraphs which have a direct bearing on the question of the relative influence of heredity and environment in the production of social degeneration. (80)

"So in the chromatin of his two parent cells Richard Roe finds his Potentialities, his capacities, and his limitations. But latent in these are other capacities and other limitations handed down from earlier generations. Each grandfather and grandmother has some claim on Richard Roe, and, behind these, dead hands from older graves are still beckoning in his direction. . . . The bluer the blood, that is, the more closely alike these ancestors are, the greater will be the common factor, ... in perfect thorough-breeding the individual should have no peculiarities at all.. . .Weakness or badness is more often thoroughbred than strength or virtue. The bluest of blood may run in the veins of the pauper as well as in those of the aristocrat.. . .Too narrow a line of descent tends to intensify weakness. Vigor and originality come from the mingling of variant elements.. . ."