Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/332

316 must go without a portion in natural goods if the resources of Nature are in any degree limited. That the resources of Nature are inadequate to provide for such numbers, with the extraordinary increase, is a matter of course; for if not so now, how soon must it become so, as the increase goes on? Nature solves the problem in the simplest of ways: all the young born in the same family are not exactly alike; "variations" occur. There are those that are better nourished, those that have larger muscles, those that breathe deeper and run faster. So the question who of these shall inherit the earth, the fields, the air, the water—this is left to itself. The best of all the variations will live, and the others will die. Those that do, have thus, to all intents and purposes, been "selected" for the inheritance, just as really as if the parents of the species had left a will and had been able to enforce it. This is the principle of "natural selection."

Now, this way of looking at problems which involve aggregates of individuals and their distribution is becoming a habit of the age. Wherever the application of the principles of probability do not explain a statistical result—that is, wherever there seem to be influences which favor particular individuals at the expense of others—men turn at once to the principle of variations for the justification of this seeming partiality of Nature. And what it means is that Nature is partial to individuals in making them, in their natural heredity, rather than after they are born.

The principle of heredity with variations is a safe assumption to make in regard to mankind; and we see at once that in order to come in for a part in the social heritage of our fathers we must be born fit for it. We must be born so endowed for the race of social life that we assimilate, from our birth up, the spirit of the society into which we are reared. The unfittest, socially, are cut off. In this there is a distinction between this sphere of selection and that of the organic world. There the fittest survive, the others are lost; here the unfittest are lost, all the others survive. Social selection weeds out the unfit, the murderer, the most unsocial, and says to him, "You must die"; natural selection seeks out the most fit and says, "You alone are to live." The difference is important, for it marks a prime series of distinctions, when the conceptions drawn from biology are applied to social phenomena; but for the understanding of variations we need not now pursue it further.

Given social variations, therefore, differences among men, what becomes of this man or that? We see at once that if society is to live there must be limits set somewhere to the degree of variation which a given man may show from the standards of society. And we may find out something of these limits by looking at the evident, most marked differences which actually