not now pursue it further. The contrast may be put,
however, in a sentence: in organic evolution we have the natural
selection of the fit; in social progress we have the social
suppression of the unfit.

Given social variations, therefore, differences among men, what
becomes of this man or that? We see at once that if society is to live
there must be limits set somewhere to the degree of variation which a
given man may show from the standards of society. And we may find out
something of these limits by looking at the evident, and marked
differences which actually appear about us.

First, there is the idiot. He is not available, from a social point of
view, because he varies too much on the side of defect. He shows from
infancy that he is unable to enter into the social heritage because he
is unable to learn to do social things. His intelligence does not grow
with his body. Society pities him if he be without natural protection,
and puts him away in an institution. So of the insane, the pronounced
lunatic; he varies too much to sustain in any way the wide system of
social relationships which society requires of each individual. Either
he is unable to take care of himself, or he attempts the life of some
one else, or he is the harmless, unsocial thing that wanders among us
like an animal or stands in his place like a plant. He is not a factor
in social life; he has not come into the inheritance.

Then there is the extraordinary class of people whom we may describe
by a stronger term than those already employed. We find not only the
unsocial, the negatively unfit, those whom society puts away with pity
in its heart; there are also the antisocial, the class whom we usually
designate as criminals. These persons, like the others, are
variations; but they seem to be variations in quite another way. They
do not represent lack on the intellectual side always or alone, but on
the moral side, on the social side, as such. The least we can say of
the criminals is that they tend, by heredity or by evil example, to
violate the rules which society has seen fit to lay down for the
general security of men living together in the enjoyment of the social
heritage. So far, then, they are factors of disintegration, of
destruction; enemies of the social progress which proceeds from
generation to generation by just this process of social inheritance.
So society says to the criminal also: "You must perish." We kill off
the worst, imprison the