HEREDITARY INEFFICIENCY. 



301 



Nevertheless, the social organism of Europe and America 

 is as good as man has been able to make it. In the 

 evolution of man it has been a long struggle to attain 

 even what we have. Better conditions will be possible 

 through better material in humanity. Better relations 

 demand better men. The more perfect the organism, 

 the more evident are its deviations from perfect adap- 

 tation. 



It may be that in the conditions of life failure is not 

 due to any defect of the individual. Its cause has often 

 arisen in injustice and oppression which sometimes 

 makes the just, the brave, the wise man an outcast from 

 society. Such conditions and such failures occur in the 

 life of to-day. But under ordinary conditions those 

 who fail in life do so because of the lack of ability to 

 make themselves useful to others, or for lack of ability 

 to place themselves in harmony with the forces of Na- 

 ture with which they are surrounded. In other words, 

 most of those who fail are doomed to perish wherever 

 there exists any form of competition, and no life is 

 without it. The inert, untrained, ignorant, or vicious 

 are constitutionally unsuccessful, and from conditions 

 which these names themselves imply. Those who thus 

 fail to do their part in the struggle of life must become 

 a burden to be carried by others or else they perish, the 

 victims of misery they can make no efforts to avoid. 

 Those who are carried by society as burdens may be 

 roughly classified as paupers and criminals — those whom 

 society voluntarily supports and those supported through 

 society's lack of means of self-protection. Pauperism 

 and habitual criminality are respectively passive and ac- 

 tive states of the same disease. 



In this sense pauperism is not by any means the 

 same as poverty. Poverty is the absence of stored-up 

 economic force. It may arise from sickness, accident, 



