302 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
or from various temporary conditions. The person now 
-subject to poverty may have within him- 
self the cure for it. The pauper can not 
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organisms are withdrawn from active life and the pro- 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 
a premium for self-activity, degrada- 
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 
Poverty not 
pauperism. 
Degeneration 
of the inactive. 
