244 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



by the suppression of conflict or the increase of the material 

 comforts of life. If suicide is on the increase, and if it is increasing 

 with alarming rapidity, this is not because the efforts required 

 to-day from the individual in the struggle for existence are more 

 painful than they formerly were before the growth of indus- 

 trialism ; nor is it because the legitimate desires of the individual 

 receive less satisfaction to-day than they received five hundred 

 years ago. In proportion as industriaUsm has developed, the 

 standard of life for each social class has risen also ; for the standard 

 of life within each class tends to reach a higher level with every 

 increase of social wealth. The ever greater division of social 

 labour has ensured an intensity of production unknown to our 

 ancestors ; and this prodigious development of the productive 

 capacity of society has been for the benefit of all social cate- 

 gories. ■'^ The working-man is assured of a remuneration far in 

 excess of that earned by the working-man a few decades ago ; 

 and as this greater remimeration permits a higher standard of 

 comfort for the labouring community, we may say that it main- 

 tains the equilibrium between the greater expenditure of vital 

 forces brought about by the development of the capitalist system of 

 production and the repair of these forces. The equilibrium is dis- 

 turbed by other factors connected with the biological and hygienic 

 conditions of labour ; but as far as labour alone is concerned, the 

 remuneration has increased proportionately with the production. 

 The constant and rapid increase in the rate of suicide points, 

 therefore, not to an increase of economic misery, but to an 

 increase, and to an alarming increase, of moral misery — of 

 amoraUsm, as we have termed it. It is worse than useless to 



1 The celebrated Verdendungstheorie of Karl Marx, according to which 

 the misery of the ■working classes increases with the increase of production 

 and social wealth, has been generally abandoned by the modern Socialist 

 school, as has also the theory of the concentration of capital in a few hands, 

 and the consequent disappearance of the lower middle-class population, 

 thrust by the evolution of capitalism into the ranks of the proletariat 

 (vide notably E. Bernstein, Socialisme Theorique et Socialdemocratie Pra- 

 tique, Paris, 1900). 



