ent are housed in hospitals and asylums. The
strength of the viciously strong, when inimical to society, is tempered
by penal institutions and by the gallows. The short-sighted are provided
with spectacles, and the sickly (when they can pay for it) with
sanitariums. Pestilential marshes are drained, plagues are checked, and
disasters averted. Yet, for all that, the strong and the progeny of the
strong survive, and the weak are crushed out. The men strong of brain
are masters as of yore. They dominate society and gather to themselves
the wealth of society. With this wealth they maintain themselves and
equip their progeny for the struggle. They build their homes in
healthful places, purchase the best fruits, meats, and vegetables the
market affords, and buy themselves the ministrations of the most
brilliant and learned of the professional classes. The weak man, as of
yore, is the servant, the doer of things at the master's call. The
weaker and less efficient he is, the poorer is his reward. The weakest
work for a living wage, (when they can get work), live in unsanitary
slums, on vile and insufficient food, at the lowest depths of human
degradation. Their grasp on life is indeed precarious, their mortality
excessive, their infant death-rate appalling.

That some should be born to preferment and others to ignominy in order
that the race may progress, is cruel and sad; but none the less they are
so born. The weeding out of human souls, some for fatness and smiles,
some for leanness and tears, is surely a heartless selective process--as
heartless as it is natural. And the human family, for all its wonderful
record of adventure and achievement, has not yet succeeded in avoiding
this process. That it is incapable of doing this is not to be hazarded.
Not only is it capable, but the whole trend of society is in that
direction. All the social forces are driving man on to a time when the
old selective law will be annulled. There is no escaping it, save by the
intervention of catastrophes and cataclysms quite unthinkable. It is
inexorable. It is inexorable because the common man demands it. The
twentieth century, the common man says, is his day; the common man's day,
or, rather, the dawning of the common man's day.

Nor can it be denied. The evidence is with him. The previous centuries,
and more notably the nineteenth, have marked the rise of the common man.
From chattel slavery to serfdom, and from serfdom to