236 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



mentioned being so large, I am amazed at their 

 smallness, and regard the result as a manifest evidence 

 of the progress of the race toward " the younger day " 

 of which the poet speaks. Matters were worse, 

 infinitely worse, a hundred years ago. 



Before I proceed to consider the bond fide unemployed, 

 I wish to discuss briefly this question : Is the natural 

 and inevitable condition of human life a competitive 

 struggle for existence in which the strong survive and 

 flourish, while the weak go to the wall and perish ? 

 I need hardly say that the affirmative answer to this 

 question is regarded as almost an axiomatic truth by 

 those who apply to human life the great principle of 

 Natural Selection that is assumed to be operative 

 throughout all organic existence, determining the 

 survival of the fittest. There are those who point 

 to the Stock Exchange in London and Wall Street in 

 New York, as well as to the various Bourses on the 

 Continent of Europe, and select the gambling specu- 

 lators who, in their struggle to make wealth rapidly, 

 seek to devour one another, as typical of the business 

 man of commerce, and their methods as representing 

 the ways of the business world ; whereas these men 

 are excrescences and ulcers upon the useful and 

 necessary institutions where they pursue their infamous 

 practices, and I would as soon think of investigating 

 the laws aud conditions of health in a lazar-house as 

 the laws and conditions of ordinary commerce among 

 the bears and bulls of the Stock Exchange. The 

 existence of this class of social wreckers is one of 



