a high birth rate and a high death
rate are necessary in order that the process of selection and rejection
may go on. This is indeed a pleasant prospect for all except the
fortunate few. But the question, of course, is not whether this is
pleasant to contemplate or unpleasant, but whether it is true. Is the
evolution of a higher human type the same kind of a process as that of a
higher animal or vegetable type? Is progress achieved only through the
preservation of the fit and the elimination of the unfit? If it could be
shown that this is the case, then certainly the conditions under which
this struggle to the death is carried on would be a matter of supreme
importance. Are our social adjustments such as to facilitate, or at
least not interfere with it? Do they make the question of success or
failure, survival or elimination, depend upon individual fitness or
unfitness? This, as we have seen, is not the case, though the partisans
of the biological theory of human progress have constantly assumed it.
Mr. Mallock takes even a more extreme position than most writers of this
class, and actually says "that the social conditions of a time are the
same for all, but that it is only exceptional men who can make
exceptional use of them."[202] The unequal distribution of wealth he
seeks to justify on the ground that "the ordinary man's talents as a
producer ... have not appreciably increased in the course of two
thousand years and have certainly not increased within the past three
generations."[203]

"In the domain of modern industrial activity the many" ... he tells us,
"produce only an insignificant portion of the total, ... and in the
domain of intellectual and speculative progress the many produce or
achieve nothing."[204] If we accept his premises, we must agree with
his conclusion that democracy's indictment of our modern industrial
system falls to the ground. This view of the matter is acceptable, of
course, to those who are satisfied with present social arrangements. It
furnishes a justification for the system under which they have prospered
while others have failed. It relieves their conscience of any misgiving
and soothes them with the assurance that only through the poverty and
misery of the unfit can a higher civilization be evolved. This largely
explains the popularity among the well-to-do classes of such books as
Malthus' Principle of Population and Kidd's Social Evolution.

Such a treatment of the social problem, h