by a foresight to me at least inconceivable, it
can prevent the birth of just all the inadaptable, useless, or merely
unnecessary creatures in each generation, there must needs continue to
be, in greater or less amount, this individually futile struggle beneath
the feet of the race; somewhere and in some form there must still
persist those essentials that now take shape as the slum, the prison,
and the asylum. All over the world, as the railway network has spread,
in Chicago and New York as vividly as in London or Paris, the
commencement of the new movement has been marked at once by the
appearance of this bulky irremovable excretion, the appearance of these
gall stones of vicious, helpless, and pauper masses. There seems every
reason to suppose that this phenomenon of unemployed citizens, who are,
in fact, unemployable, will remain present as a class, perishing
individually and individually renewed, so long as civilization remains
progressive and experimental upon its present lines. Their drowning
existences may be utilized, the crude hardship of their lot may be
concealed or mitigated,[24] they may react upon the social fabric that
is attempting to eliminate them, in very astounding ways, but their
presence and their individual doom, it seems to me, will be
unavoidable--at any rate, for many generations of men. They are an
integral part of this physiological process of mechanical progress, as
inevitable in the social body as are waste matters and disintegrating
cells in the body of an active and healthy man.

The appearance of these two strange functionless elements, although the
most striking symptom of the new phase of progressive mechanical
civilization now beginning, is by no means the most essential change in
progress. These appearances involve also certain disappearances. I have
already indicated pretty clearly that the vast irregular development of
irresponsible wealthy people is swallowing up and assimilating more and
more the old class of administrative land-owning gentlemen in all their
grades and degrees. The old upper class, as a functional member of the
State, is being effaced. And I have also suggested that the old lower
class, the broad necessary base of the social pyramid, the uneducated
inadaptable peasants and labourers, is, with the development of
toil-saving machinery, dwindling and crumbling down bit by bit towards
the abyss. But side by side with these two processes is a third process
of still p