302 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 



or from various temporary conditions. The person now 



subject to poverty may have within him- 

 over y no ^^j^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ .^ ^j^^ pauper can not 



pauperism. '^ ^ 



cure himself, and all help given him but 



intensifies his pauperism. 



There are various conditions — sickness, dissipation, 

 the weakness of age, evil associations — that may plunge 

 the average man from poverty into pauperism. We are 

 none too well equipped for the struggle for life at the 

 best, and the loss of weapons or armour may make any 

 man helpless for the time being. But some are help- 

 less from birth. There is in every nation a multitude 

 of men and women to whom fitness is impossible. In 

 the submerged tenth of every land may be found the 

 broken and stricken, the ruined in body and spirit. But 

 the majority of these have never been, could never be, 

 anything else than what they are. They are simply in- 

 capable, and they are the descendants of others who in 

 similar conditions have been likewise incapable. In a 

 world of work where clear vision and a clear conscience 

 are necessary to life they find themselves without sense 

 of justice, without capacity of mind, without desire for 

 action. They are born to misery, and the aggregate 

 of misery would be sensibly lessened had they never 

 been born. 



It is a fact of biology that whenever any series of 

 organisms are withdrawn from active life and the pro- 

 cess of natural selection no longer offers 



Degeneration „• r ir ^- .. j j 



, , . . a premium for self-activity, degrada- 



of the inactive. . ^ , . 



tion sets in. Organs are lost as their 



functions are abandoned. In this way the descent of 

 the inert barnacle from the active crablike forms is ac- 

 counted for. In similar manner the degraded parasitic 

 Sacculina is shown to be of crustacean or crablike or- 

 igin. The young Sacculina and the young crab are 



