286 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



tenance of the fundamental principles on wMch tlie economic 

 fabric of to-day is based. It is all very well to say that there 

 must always be rich and poor ; nothing is truer, and nothing is 

 less to the point. Eiches and poverty have always existed ; but 

 the growing army of criminals, the increase in the rate of suicide, 

 of insanity, of alcoholic disease, and of general paralysis — all 

 this is modem, peculiarly modern, and it has nothing to do with 

 ^ riches and poverty. The faith of the working classes has 

 vanished ; and with the belief in the justice of God has gone 

 their belief in the justice of Society. And meanwhile the 

 working classes have become the prey of Socialism and of other 

 revolutionary Utopias, which all represent the quintessence of 

 nihilism, as we shall see in another chapter. Thus, what might 

 have been expected a "priori has indeed been realised. Society 

 is disintegrated because its economic conditions have not har- 

 monised in their development with the development of other 

 and equally important conditions. We have before us, on the 

 one hand, a society in a state of chronic frenzied excitement, 

 whose sole aim seems to be the acquisition of individual wealth 

 at the expense of everything else, and whose motto is " Every 

 one for himself " — a motto which is the negation of social exist- 

 ence ; and whose philosophy is summed up in the doctrine^ of 

 the sufficiency of the individual as an end unto himself — a philo- 

 sophy which is likewise the negation of social existence. On 

 the other hand, we see those links which, in the past, have 

 bound societies together, and which are forged by the common 

 sentiment of solidarity, menaced with destruction. The economic 

 solidarity which bound together the feudal lord and the serf, 

 and which united the members of the trading guilds in the Middle 

 Ages, has been replaced by the struggle of all against all, by 

 the clash of antagonistic individual interests. Those other Hnks 

 of solidarity, religious and patriotic, which were efficacious in 

 promoting social cohesion in the past are likewise menaced. The 

 sentiment inspired by religious belief is greatly weakened, and 



