We all breathe a social atmosphere; and our growth is by this breathing-in of the tradition and example of the past.
Now, if this be the social heritage, we may go on to ask: Who are to inherit it?
To this we may again add the further question: How does the one who is born to such a heritage as this come into his inheritance?
And with this yet again: How may he use his inheritance--to what end and under what limitations?
These questions come so readily into the mind that we naturally wish the discussion to cover them.
Generally, then, who is eligible for the social inheritance?
This heir to society we are, all of us.

Society does not make a will, it is true; nor does society die intestate.

To say that it is we who inherit the riches of the social past of the race, is to say that we are the children of the past in a sense which comes upon us with all the force that bears in upon the natural heir when he finds his name in will or law.

But there are exceptions.

And before we seek the marks of the legitimacy of our claim to be the heirs of the hundreds of years of accumulated thought and action, it may be well to advise ourselves as to the poor creatures who do not enter into the inheritance with us.
They are those who people our asylums, our reformatories, our jails and penitentiaries; those who prey upon the body of our social life by demands for charitable support, or for the more radical treatment by isolation in institutions; indeed, some who are born to fail in this inheritance are with us no more, even though they were of our generation; they have paid the penalty which their effort to wrest the inheritance from us has cost, and the grave of the murderer, the burglar, the suicide, the red-handed rebel against the law of social inheritance, is now their resting place.