social organization to a violently progressive one.
This second consequence of progress is the appearance of a great number
of people without either property or any evident function in the social
organism. This new ingredient is most apparent in the towns, it is
frequently spoken of as the Urban Poor, but its characteristic traits
are to be found also in the rural districts. For the most part its
individuals are either criminal, immoral, parasitic in more or less
irregular ways upon the more successful classes, or labouring, at
something less than a regular bare subsistence wage, in a finally
hopeless competition against machinery that is as yet not so cheap as
their toil. It is, to borrow a popular phrase, the "submerged" portion
of the social body, a leaderless, aimless multitude, a multitude of
people drifting down towards the abyss. Essentially it consists of
people who have failed to "catch on" to the altered necessities the
development of mechanism has brought about, they are people thrown out
of employment by machinery, thrown out of employment by the escape of
industries along some newly opened line of communication to some remote
part of the world, or born under circumstances that give them no
opportunity of entering the world of active work. Into this welter of
machine-superseded toil there topples the non-adaptable residue of every
changing trade; its members marry and are given in marriage, and it is
recruited by the spendthrifts, weaklings, and failures of every superior
class.

Since this class was not apparent in masses in the relatively static,
relatively less eliminatory, society of former times, its appearance has
given rise to a belief that the least desirable section of the community
has become unprecedentedly prolific, that there is now going on a "Rapid
Multiplication of the Unfit." But sooner or later, as every East End
doctor knows, the ways of the social abyss lead to death, the premature
death of the individual, or death through the death or infertility of
the individual's stunted offspring, or death through that extinction
which moral perversion involves. It is a recruited class, not a breeding
multitude. Whatever expedients may be resorted to, to mitigate or
conceal the essential nature of this social element, it remains in its
essence wherever social progress is being made, the contingent of death.
Humanity has set out in the direction of a more complex and exacting
organization, and until,