THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE : A PROGRAMME. 741 



for forms of government or ideal considerations of any sort ; and 

 nothing really stirs the great multitude of mankind to break with 

 custom and incur the manifest perils of revolt except the belief that 

 misery in this world or damnation in the next, or both, are threatened 

 by the continuance of the state of things in Avhich they have been 

 brought up. But when they do attain that conviction, society be- 

 comes as unstable as a package of dynamite, and a very small matter 

 will produce the explosion which sends it back to the chaos of 

 savagery. 



It needs no argument to prove that, when the price of labor sinks 

 below a certain point, the worker infallibly falls into that condition 

 which the French emphatically call la misere. — a word for which I do 

 not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in 

 which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the 

 mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state 

 can not be obtained ; in which men, women, and children are forced 

 to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished and the most ordinary 

 conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment ; in 

 which the pleasures within reach are reduced to bestiality and drunk- 

 enness ; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest, in the 

 shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degrada- 

 tion ; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a 

 life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave. 



That a certain proportion of the members of every great aggrega- 

 tion of mankind should constantly tend to establish and populate such 

 a 3Ialebolge as this is inevitable, so long as some people are by nature 

 idle and vicious, while others are disabled by sickness or accident, or 

 thrown upon the world by the death of their bread-winners. So long 

 as that proportion is restricted within tolerable limits, it can be dealt 

 with ; and, so far as it arises only from such causes, its existence may 

 and must be patiently borne. But, when the organization of society, 

 instead of mitigating this tendency, tends to continue and intensify 

 it ; when a given social order plainly makes for evil and not for good, 

 men naturally enough begin to think it high time to try a fresh ex- 

 periment. The animal man, finding that the ethical man has landed 

 him in such a slough, resumes his ancient sovereignty and preaches 

 anarchy ; which is, substantially, a proposal to reduce the social cos- 

 mos to chaos and begin the brute struggle for existence once again. 



Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all 

 great industrial centers, whether in this or other countries, is aware 

 that, amid a large and increasing body of that population, la misere 

 reigns supreme. I have no pretensions to the character of a philan- 

 thropist, and I have a special horror of all sorts of sentimental rhetoric ; 

 I am merely trying to deal with facts, to some extent within my own 

 knowledge, and further evidenced by abundant testimony, as a natu- 

 ralist ; and I take it to be a mere plain truth that, throughout indus- 



