462 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



system as it affects the wage-earning classes. Dr. Toulouse, the 

 director of the Revue Scientifiqtce, gives us the following picture of 

 the results of our present polity : " For our country only (France), 

 thousands of human beings aborted on the threshold of hfe, 

 thousands of others bom in miserable biological conditions, 

 thousands of young people prematurely exhausted by factory 

 work and incapable of becoming complete citizens, thousands of 

 men rendered useless or killed as the result of an accident due to 

 a moment of inattention caused by fatigue, thousands of 

 working men tired out before the usual age-hmit and excluded 

 from the field of labour, henceforth unproductive and useless." ^ 

 Professor Charles Gide informs us that "in England the result of 

 numerous statistical calculations goes to show that the average 

 length of life among the wealthy classes varies between fifty-five 

 and sixty -five years of age ; whereas it sinks to twenty-eight years 

 and less for the working classes. In London . . . mortaUty 

 varies from 11-3 per cent, in the opulent quarters to 50 per cent, 

 in the indigent quarters." ^ And Professor Gide concludes that 

 "the smaller the share which a man has in the wealth of the social 

 aggregate, the greater is the ransom which he must pay to sick- 

 ness and death." 



These are only a few testimonies, culled at random ; and their 

 authors are not mob-orators or demagogues seeking to gain 

 popular suffrage by means of inflamed harangue, but distin- 

 guished University Professors, men of international reputation 

 in the world of thought, men certainly prone neither to mis- 

 representation nor to exaggeration. M. Paul Topinard speaks as 

 follows of the conditions of social life to-day : " The tyrannical 

 domination of a few over all the others, the few having all the 

 advantages, the others all the misery ; society divided up into 

 classes, the strong at the top, the feeble at the bottom, the 

 former having all the profits, the latter all the losses ; and, what 



^ Dr. Toulouse in Le Journal, September 23, 1903. 

 2 C. Gide, Principes d'Economie Politique, p. 417. Paris, tenth edition 

 1906. 



