378 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



certainly not prone to exaggeration, wrote fifteen years ago that 

 " anyone who is acquainted with the state of the population of 

 all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, 

 is aware that, amidst a large and increasing body of that popu- 

 lation, la misere reigns supreme. ... I take it to be a mere 

 plain truth that, throughout industrial Europe, there is not a 

 single large manufacturing city which is free from a vast mass of 

 people whose condition is exactly that described, and from a 

 still greater mass who, living just on the edge of the social swamp, 

 are liable to be precipitated into it by any lack of demand for 

 their produce. And with every addition to the population the 

 multitude already sunk in the pit and the number of the host 

 sliding towards it continually increase."^ Is it to the interest 

 of this mass thus to live, even if such conditions were to profit 

 future generations (which we do not admit), and to benefit the 

 evolution of society in general ? But suppress the economic 

 system which is at the basis of all this misery, decree an era of 

 practical equality and no conflict, and what will be attained ? 

 In the long run, nothing. Human nature is stronger than any 

 system, because it is human nature which creates that system. 

 And human nature demands expansion ; it is never satisfied ; 

 its insatiability would lead it to overthrow to-morrow the system 

 which it erected to-day. As it must expand in order to satisfy 

 its wants, so must conflicts surge afresh; and the new regime 

 would soon appear to those living under it as the old regime 

 appears to Socialist economists to-day. 



The lesson which we must draw from these facts is that, if 

 the conditions of life of the majority at any given period are in 

 opposition to the rational dictates of that majority, and in oppo- 

 sition to the interests of the race as a whole ; nevertheless, they 

 are conditions from which no escape is possible ; for the conditions 

 of evolution of the race are necessarily the conditions of evolution 

 of all human life. And, if expansion and its results, conflict and 



* T. H. Huxley, SociaZ Diseases and Worse Remedies, pp. 32, 33. 1891. 



