Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/523

Rh itself there are not only different physical types, but very different ideas respecting marriage and divorce embodied in the laws regulating those fundamental institutions in England, Scotland and Ireland. If such fundamental differences exist in that most important of social institutions, we may well expect that the natural laws which differentiate one race from another may be at work within every community in the United Kingdom.

Yet though the world has been ringing with the doctrine of natural selection and the survival of the fittest for nearly half a century, no statesman ever dreams of taking these great principles into consideration when devising any scheme of education or social reform. On the contrary, it is a fundamental assumption in all our educational and social reforms that all men are born with equal capacities; that there is no difference in this respect between the average child of the laborer, sprung from many generations of laborers, and one born of many generations of middle-or upper-class progenitors; and it is held that all that is necessary to make the children of the working classes equal, if not superior, to the children of the bourgeois is the same food, the same clothing and the same educational advantages. On that account we have devised the so-called educational ladder. Yet if we ask any social reformer why are there middle classes, the answer will probably be that they are better off. But why are they better off? We are told that their fathers and mothers were better off, and that they thus got a better chance than the poor laborer. But why were the parents of these middle-class folks better off? Oh! they came of families that had been long well-to-do. But why were these families long well-to-do? At last we are brought to the conclusion of the northern farmer, that "Work mun 'a' gone to the gittin' whiniver munny was got," and to his brutal correlative respecting the laborers that "Them or thir feythers, tha sees, mun 'a' beän a laäzy lot."

Work no doubt has been a main factor in the evolution of the middle and upper classes, especially in later times, though undoubtedly other qualities, such as superior physique and superior courage, have been very important elements in the earlier stages. But at all times it is not improbable that the special quality which led to their rise was a superior self-restraint, that enabled them to resist the vices which are too often attendant on prosperity. This superior morale acts in turn upon the offspring by setting up a better standard of life in the home, which of itself gives children brought up in such an environment an advantage at the outset of life denied to the children of inferior parents. It needs no elaborate induction to prove that the middle classes are not the outcome of chance, but of a long process of natural selection and the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life, the two main factors in this evolution being, in the language of Aristotle, heredity and