In my office at the Fleming Museum is a pin map of Burlington prepared by two of my students in Eugenics. They visited the Weeks School in Vergennes and obtained records of recent admissions from Burlington, together with the definite addresses. The two students then took a map of Burlington and stuck a pin into it at each address of a Burlington boy or girl then at the Weeks School (eighteen months ago).

That map has something to tell us and we shall have to listen to its message sometime whether we like it or not, even if it affects our pocketbooks to do so. If we refuse, our children will have to. As you would expect, the pins are clustered thickly in certain limited areas almost lacking elsewhere. Let's take the map and the two boys who made it and follow the streets of those thick clusters of pins.

You have already guessed the answers. Where the pins are thickest living conditions are worst‐‐overcrowded, unsanitary excuses for homes, unhealthy, wretched places to bring up children hard to preserve a vestige of privacy, decency, morals‐‐Impossible you would say. Put yourself or me in that "home" and what kind of children would we bring up, even if we have a fine inheritance? Small thanks to us that we have had better luck.

Those children will grow up‐‐, some of them. Many adults of today were children in those below‐par dwellings when some of us were more privileged youngsters 25 or 30 years ago, housed graciously and healthfully. What records have these adults made as citizens, as parents? I am an ardent disciple of the doctrine of heredity, but I cannot shut my eyes to environment. Whether you plant good seed or bad or both, you must expect poor crops if the soil and climate are poor. By the same token, raise a child in a sub‐standard "home", surround him or her with vicious‐minded playmates and frequently you get an adult who is a charge on the town, a drunken loafer or a criminal, for your pains.

Burlington, like many less happily situated cities, has frequently been blinded by immediate quick returns on her investments. She has lost many of her most wonderful residential areas through blindness and greed. What became of our Lakeshore Drive, our Intervale Parkway? Our forbears did that to us. What are we doing to our successors? Something worse, I humbly opine, if we let slip a chance to give the dwellers in those slum spots of our "Queen City" a chance at least to vacate the wretched excuses for abodes that some of us, as bad luck would have it, find ourselves owning or controlling. We can ill afford to lose the rent, but in the name of everything that is decent, moral and, surely, in the future, profitable to our successors, let us think of the next generation.

If we can be just a little bit wise now, I think we can take a longer look ahead, forget our immediate prospects of prosperity, think more of the Burlingtonians of tomorrow. If we can put ourselves into that frame of mind now, the housing plan will commend itself to us and win our hearty support. It may be a poor plan in some respects, to our judgment, but almost any plan that means doing something will be better than this stagnation.

Take a look at that pin map. Don't decide until you have.