Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/159

Rh And now, to carry home the conclusion that the legislator should bring to his business a vivid consciousness of these and other such broad truths concerning the human society with which he proposes to deal, let me present somewhat more fully one of them not yet mentioned.

The continued life of every higher species of creature depends on conformity, now to one, now to the other, of two radically-opposed principles. The early lives of its members and the adult lives of its members have to be dealt with in contrary ways. We will contemplate them in their natural order.

One of the most familiar facts is that animals of superior types, comparatively slow in reaching maturity, are enabled, when they have reached it, to give more aid to their offspring than animals of inferior types. The adults foster their young during periods more or less prolonged, while yet the young are unable to provide for themselves; and it is obvious that maintenance of the species can be secured only by a parental care adjusted to the need consequent on imperfection. It requires no proving that the blind, unfledged hedgebird, or the young puppy even after it has acquired sight, would forthwith die if it had to keep itself warm and obtain its own food. The gratuitous parental aid must be great in proportion as the young one is of little worth, either to itself or to others; and it may diminish as fast as, by increasing development, the young one acquires worth, at first for self-sustentation, and by-and-by for sustentation of others. That is to say, during immaturity, benefits received must be inversely as the power or ability of the receiver. Clearly, if during this first part of life benefits were proportioned to merits, or rewards to deserts, the species would disappear in a generation.

From this régime of the family-group, let us turn to the régime of that larger group formed by the adult members of the species. Ask what happens when the new individual, acquiring complete use of its powers and ceasing to have parental aid, is left to itself. Now there comes into play a principle just the reverse of that above described. Throughout the rest of its life, each adult gets benefit in proportion to merit—reward in proportion to desert: merit and desert in each case being understood as ability to fulfill all the requirements of life—to get food, to secure shelter, to escape enemies. Placed in competition with members of its own species, and in antagonism with members of other species, it dwindles and gets killed off, or thrives and propagates, according as it is ill-endowed or well-endowed. Manifestly an opposite régime could it be maintained, would, in course of time, be fatal to the species. If the benefits received by each member of it were proportionate to its inferiority—if, as a consequence, multiplication of the inferior was furthered and multiplication of the superior hindered, progressive degradation would result; and eventually