e struggles and processes by which civilized society has
been made into an arena, within which exploitation of man by man is to
some extent repressed, and where individual self-realization has a large
scope, under the institutions of civil liberty. It is the historical and
selected classes which have done this, often enough without intending or
foreseeing the results of actions which they inaugurated with quite
other, perhaps selfish, class purposes in view. A society is a whole
made up of parts. All the parts have a legitimate share in the acts and
sufferings of the society. All the parts contribute to the life and work
of the society. We inherit all the consequences of all their acts. Some
of the consequences are good and some are bad. It is utterly impossible
to name the classes which have done useful work and made beneficial
sacrifices only, and the other classes which have been idle burdens and
mischief makers only. All that has been done has been done by all. It is
evident that no other view than this can be rational and true, for one
reason because the will and intention of the men of to-day in what they
do has so little to do with the consequences to-morrow of what they do.
The notion that religion, or marriage, or property, or monarchy, as we
have inherited them, can be proved evil, or worthy of condemnation and
contempt on account of the selfishness and violence interwoven with
their history, is one of the idlest of all the vagaries of the social
philosophers.

+57. The common man.+ Every civilized society has to carry below the
lowest sections of the masses a dead weight of ignorance, poverty,
crime, and disease. Every such society has, in the great central section
of the masses, a great body which is neutral in all the policy of
society. It lives by routine and tradition. It is not brutal, but it is
shallow, narrow-minded, and prejudiced. Nevertheless it is harmless. It
lacks initiative and cannot give an impulse for good or bad. It produces
few criminals. It can sometimes be moved by appeals to its fixed ideas
and prejudices. It is affected in its mores by contagion from the
classes above it. The work of "popularization" consists in bringing
about this contagion. The middle section is formed around the
mathematical mean of the society, or around the mathematical mode, if
the distribution of the subdivisions is not symmetrical. The man on the
mode is the "common man," the "average man," or the "man in the str