Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/428

428 not only from the humblest but from the most disadvantageous beginnings to positions of wealth and influence. It is all a question of fitness. In the social sphere, as elsewhere, the fit will survive and flourish; the pre-eminently fit will flourish pre-eminently. It may be that pre-eminent fitness for present social conditions may not imply ideal excellence of character; no doubt it does not; still the fact remains that success is a question of adaptation, and that want of success or poverty means non-adaptation.

All this may seem very trite, but it would not be safe to argue that because a thing is trite all the good it is capable of yielding has been extracted from it. In the general craze for novelty, old truths are abandoned before they have been half worked out. The theories of the Anti-Poverty Society are very taking with the multitude; but we venture to predict that, after they have had their day, men will find that there is still much to do on the old lines to which we are now calling attention. The way to kill poverty, we hold, is to kill it individually that is to say, to bring such influences to bear on the unfit as shall render them fit; to make war against idleness, inefficiency, stupidity, extravagance, weak self-indulgence, and all else that makes for poverty either by diminishing the productiveness of labor or by promoting undue consumption. It is sometimes held that the laboring classes do not get their fair share of the proceeds of their industry; but the fact is not insisted on as it might be that the share they get will at any given time be directly proportional to their own inherent merits as workers and as men. The question is how near can they come to negotiating on a footing of perfect equality with the employers of labor, and that depends upon the bearing and attitude which they are enabled to assume. A body of thoroughly intelligent and self-respecting men, with established habits of self-control and general capacity for self-guidance, would enter upon the negotiation with far better chances of concluding it to their satisfaction than would a body of men less intelligent and less under moral control, even allowing the latter the benefit of all the most improved appliances for industrial war, including street-rioting and the persecution of "scabs." It is mainly a moral and intellectual reform that is wanted; and we are far from saying that it is wanted only in the ranks of those who earn their bread by the labor of their hands. No serious person can consider the extravagance which now marks the expenditure of the middle and upper classes (if we may without offense use such terms as these to indicate comparative degrees of wealth), without feeling that a bad example of profusion and ostentation is shown to the wage-earners—that a wrong ideal of life is set before them. It is true now, as ever, that a man's life "consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth"; but it hardly seems as if any one to-day believed it. The majority at least only seem to live in proportion as they surround themselves with visible and tangible evidences of their material prosperity. One consequence—very important in relation to our present subject—is that a standard of living is set up which not all who become accustomed to it can permanently maintain; and thus extravagance leads to poverty. How many are miserably poor to-day whose parents brought them up in comfort, if not in affluence! We say "miserably poor," because poverty is never so miserable as when complicated with vain regrets and a general sense of disinheritance and decay. If we would fight against poverty, therefore, we must fight against it everywhere, and try to make all classes of society understand that life is a struggle for which a definite equipment is required, and that no part of that equipment is more essential than moderation of desire. Much, also, as the