ans, of course, that whatever the
inheritance is, all do not inherit it; some must go without a portion
whenever the resources of nature, or the family, are in any degree
limited and when competition is sharp.

Now Nature solves the problem among the animals in the simplest of
ways. All the young born in the same family are not exactly alike;
"variations" occur. There are those that are better nourished, those
that have larger muscles, those that breathe deeper and run faster. So
the question who of these shall inherit the earth, the fields, the
air, the water--this is left to itself. The best of all the variations
live, and the others die. Those that do live have thus, to all intents
and purposes, been "selected" for the inheritance, just as really as
if the parents of the species had left a will and had been able to
enforce it. This is the principle of "Natural Selection."

Now, this way of looking at problems which involve aggregates of
individuals and their distribution is becoming a habit of the age.
Wherever the application of the principles of probability do not
explain a statistical result--that is, wherever there seem to be
influences which favour particular individuals at the expense of
others--men turn at once to the occurrence of Variations for the
justification of this seeming partiality of Nature. And what it means
is that Nature is partial to individuals _in making them_, in their
natural heredity, rather than after they are born.

The principle of heredity with variations is a safe assumption to make
also in regard to mankind; and we see at once that in order to come in
for a part in the social heritage of our fathers we must be born fit
for it. We must be born so endowed for the race of social life that we
assimilate, from our birth up, the spirit of the society into which we
are reared. The unfittest, socially, are suppressed. In this there is
a distinction between this sphere of survival and that of the animal
world. In it the fittest survive, the others are lost; but in society
the unfittest are lost, all the others survive. Social selection weeds
out the unfit, the murderer, the most unsocial man, and says to him:
"You must die"; natural selection seeks out the most fit and says:
"You alone are to live." The difference is important, for it marks a
prime series of distinctions, when the conceptions drawn from biology
are applied to social phenomena; but for the understanding of
variations we need