ZOOLOGICAL LAWS 519 



dom itself there are not only different physical types, but very dif- 

 ferent 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 com- 

 munity 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 considera- 

 tion 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. Gn 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' bean a laazy 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 



