70 THE LAWS OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY 



those powerful branches which form, as it were, the prop or 

 scaffolding of the crown or spreading top, and no inconsiderable 

 part of the entire tree itself. 



The lower buds, on the contrary, developed from the axillae of 

 the lower leaves, make no headway, but continue in the same fix, 

 year after year, pining in poverty and inactivity. There is no dif- 

 ficulty in finding any quantity of such miserable starvling shoots 

 on the branches of the Beech, the Horse-Chestnut, the Apple, 

 and other trees. The current of sap is drawn away from them 

 by the upper and more powerful branches, and there is not a 

 particle of chance left for them except in the excision or death 

 of the upper branches. 



We have seen that the tree, during the first year of its life, has 

 only a poor chance of progress on account of the few leaves 

 which it has at work in the air, and that, when it has arrived at 

 the stage of development prefigured by one of its branches, it 

 possesses a much greater amount of vitally active leaf-surface, 

 and consequently its growth becomes more rapid, and its chances 

 of arriving at maturity multiplied a thousandfold. Now, the 

 same relative condition of things exists between these pitiful 

 twigs and powerful branches, with reference to their respective 

 means of obtaining food, as existed between the tree and nature 

 during the first year of its life, and again at the end of twenty 

 or thirty years. What chance have simple shoots with a few 

 leaves, the normal growth of one year, against powerful branches, 

 which are, it may be, the growth of centuries, which put forth 

 a hundred shoots, like themselves, from their sides and summit, 

 the leaves of which are all subservient to their development ? 

 It is plain that inequality of condition, once engendered, has a 

 tendency to go on increasing, and that the shoots and branches 

 of a tree, when once ahead, are very apt to keep ahead. 



And is there nothing analogous to this in the social world? 

 Is not the whole frame-work of our present social system founded 

 on the eternally unchangeable law of the subordination and sub- 

 serviency of one human organism to another ? In order to be 

 happy, man must be left free to develope himself. But individ- 

 ual freedom must necessarily generate inequality so long as one 

 human organism has more life-energy than another. We see 



