unmarried
woman called a 'female non-childbearing human.' And at the worst, men
actually cease to be even animals; they become mere numbers; they are
calculated by the theory of combinations; they are masses, averages,
classes, curves, anything but men! For every million of the
population, it has been solemnly estimated, there will be one genius,
one imbecile, 256,791 individuals just above the mean, 256,791 just
below it! Observe, 256,791! Not, as one might have been tempted to
believe, 256,790! What a saving grace in that odd unit! And this is
the kind of thing that is revolutionizing history and politics!
No more great men, no more heroic actions, no more inspirations,
passions, and ideals! Nothing but calculations of the chances that A
will meet and breed out of B! Nothing but analysis of the mechanism of
survival! Nothing but----"

"My dear Ellis," interrupted Wilson, "you appear to me to be
digressing."

"Digressing!" he cried "Would that I could digress out of this world
altogether! Would that I could digress to a planet where they have no
arithmetic! Where a man could be a man, not a figure in an addition
sum, a unit in an average, an individual in a species----"

"Where," exclaimed Audubon, taking him up, "a man could be himself, as
I have often said, 'imperial, plain, and true.'"

There was a chorus of protestation at the too familiar quotation;
and for a time I was unable to lay hold of the broken thread of the
argument. But at last I got a hearing for the question I was anxious
to address to Wilson.

"You say," I began, "that by Good we mean the Good of the community?"

"I say," he replied, "that that is what we ought to mean."

"But in what sense do you understand the word community?"

"In the sense of that organization of individuals which represents, so
to speak, the species."

"How represents?"

"In the sense that it is its function to maintain and perfect the
species."

"But is that the function of the community?"

"If it is not, it ought to be; and to a great extent it is. If you
look at the social mechanism, not with the eyes of a mere historian,
who usually sees nothing, but with those of a biologist and man of
science, intent upon essentials, you will find that it is nothing but
an elaborate apparatus of selection, natural or artificial, as you
like to call it. First, there is the struggle of races, which may be
traced not only in war and conquest, but more insidiously under the
gui