XII.

HEREDITARY INEFFICIENCY.

THIS world is not, on the whole, a hard world to live in if one have the knack of making the proper concessions. Hosts of animals, plants, and

The art of living. men have acquired this knack, and they and their descendants are able to hold their own in the pressure of the struggle for existence. This pressure brings about the persistence of the obedient, those whose. activities accord with the demands of their environment. This persistence of the adaptive is known as the survival of the fittest, which has through the ages been the chief element of organic progress. Among men there have always been those to whom the art of living was impossible. This has been the case under ordinary conditions as well as under extraordinary ones. It must be the case with some under any conceivable environment or any circumstances of life. Some variations must tend in the direction of incapacity. This incapacity of one generation, if inborn and not induced by disease or malnutrition, may be handed down by the law of heredity to the next.

In one way or another, in time, most of the incapables are eliminated by the process of natural selection. But not all of them. Our social system is bound too closely. Hereditary incapacity of the few has been in all ages a burden on the many who could take care of

Mutual help preserves the incapable.

themselves. With higher civilization and an increasing recognition of the value of mutual help it is becoming more and more possible for those to live who do not help. The descendants of these increase in number with the others. They are protected by the others. Thus the future of hereditary weakness is a growing problem in our social organization.

Of course the conditions of life have never yet made the "survival of the fittest" the real survival of the best. The growth of civilization apThe easy world. proaches this end, but has never reached it. If this were reached, adaptation to the conditions. of life would be a nobler process than it now is. It is not that the conditions of life are too hard. We would not make them easier if we could. But the welfare of humanity demands that they be made more just. An easier world would be one in which idleness, vice, and inefficiency fare better than now, and energy, virtue, and efficiency correspondingly worse. The premium natural selection places on self-activity and mutual help is none too great at the best and should not be lessened. Nature is over-indulgent toward idleness rather than too cruel. The degradation of life in the tropics comes because in those regions the stress of the human struggles is distinctly lowered. The real "City of the Dreadful Night" is not noisy, eager, struggling, unjust London. It is some city of the tropics where action and virtue count for nothing because there is no incentive to live a life worth living, and no adequate penalty for stagnation and inefficiency.

It is easy to frame indictments against modern society and its organization. We may see it as weak, tyrannical, depressing, artificial, cruel, or unjust, as we may give attention to its least favourable manifestations.

Nevertheless, the social organism of Europe and America is as good as man has been able to make it. In the evolution of man it has been a long struggle to attain even what we have. Better conditions will be possible through better material in humanity. Better relations demand better men. The more perfect the organism, the more evident are its deviations from perfect adaptation.

It may be that in the conditions of life failure is not due to any defect of the individual. Its cause has often arisen in injustice and oppression which sometimes makes the just, the brave, the wise man an outcast from society. Such conditions and such failures occur in the life of to-day. But under ordinary conditions those who fail in life do so because of the lack of ability to make themselves useful to others, or for lack of ability to place themselves in harmony with the forces of Nature with which they are surrounded. In other words, most of those who fail are doomed to perish wherever there exists any form of competition, and no life is without it. The inert, untrained, ignorant, or vicious are constitutionally unsuccessful, and from conditions which these names themselves imply. Those who thus fail to do their part in the struggle of life must become a burden to be carried by others or else they perish, the victims of misery they can make no efforts to avoid. Those who are carried by society as burdens may be roughly classified as paupers and criminals-those whom society voluntarily supports and those supported through society's lack of means of self-protection. Pauperism and habitual criminality are respectively passive and active states of the same disease.

In this sense pauperism is not by any means the same as poverty. Poverty is the absence of stored-up economic force. It may arise from sickness, accident,

or from various temporary conditions. The person now subject to poverty may have within himself the cure for it. The pauper can not cure himself, and all help given him but

Poverty not pauperism.

intensifies his pauperism.

In

There are various conditions—sickness, dissipation, the weakness of age, evil associations-that may plunge the average man from poverty into pauperism. We are none too well equipped for the struggle for life at the best, and the loss of weapons or armour may make any man helpless for the time being. But some are helpless from birth. There is in every nation a multitude of men and women to whom fitness is impossible. the submerged tenth of every land may be found the broken and stricken, the ruined in body and spirit. But the majority of these have never been, could never be, anything else than what they are. They are simply incapable, and they are the descendants of others who in similar conditions have been likewise incapable. In a world of work where clear vision and a clear conscience are necessary to life they find themselves without sense of justice, without capacity of mind, without desire for action. They are born to misery, and the aggregate of misery would be sensibly lessened had they never been born.

Degeneration of the inactive.

It is a fact of biology that whenever any series of organisms are withdrawn from active life and the process of natural selection no longer offers a premium for self-activity, degradation sets in. Organs are lost as their functions are abandoned. In this way the descent of the inert barnacle from the active crablike forms is accounted for. In similar manner the degraded parasitic Sacculina is shown to be of crustacean or crablike origin. The young Sacculina and the young crab are

essentially alike for a period after their birth. The crab continues and develops an active life. The Sacculina thrusts its feelers into the body of the crab on which it is to feed. Its organs of eating and swimming disappear. All structures connected with independent life become atrophied, and finally nothing is left of the Sacculina except its saclike body, its feelers or roots ramifying through the blood vessels of the crab, and its reproductive organs by which the brood of parasites is kept alive. When the habit of parasitism is once established, the struggle for existence simply intensifies it from generation to generation.

The fittest Sacculina is the most degenerate one. In like manner whenever a race or family of men has fallen away from self-helpfulness the forces of evolution intensify its parasitism. The successful pauper is the one who retains no capacity for anything else. The loss of all other possibilities is the best preparation for the life of the sneak thief.

Recent studies, as those of Dugdale, McCulloch, and others, have shown that parasitism is hereditary in the human species as in the Sacculina. McCulloch has selected the Sacculina for special illustration of the results of like processes in the human family. Like produces like in the world of life. Those qualities in the grandparent which made him an outcast from society or a burden upon it reappear in the father and again in the son. As in one case, so in the others, they determine his relation to society. The pauper is the victim of heredity, but neither Nature nor society recognises that as an excuse for his existence. The forces of Nature take no account of motive and are no respecters of persons. Dugdale has shown that parasitism, pauperism, prostitution, and crime reappear generation after generation in the descendants of "Margaret, the mother