258 THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 
jects of the monarch are having more and more 
rights. The people of England are surely as free 
as are the people of the United States. Increasingly 
all forms of government will secure for all their sub- 
jects, no matter what their station in life, a fair share 
of the general prosperity. In this field, human evo- 
lution is perhaps more rapid than in any other. 
Any individual human being is a network of traits 
and peculiarities. He has all the ordinary attributes 
of humanity, but to the whole complex he gives an 
individual peculiarity which is totally his own. 
Where did he get his qualities? In the earlier times 
the fairies were supposed to have blessed him or 
cursed him in his cradle. A later age saw in the 
stars the rulers of man’s destiny. He was jovial, or 
saturnine, or martial, depending on the planet which 
was in the ascendant at the time of his birth, Now 
we know “it is not in our stars but in ourselves that 
we are underlings.” Everything a man is comes to 
him from within or from without; from nature or 
from nurture; from his heredity or from his en- 
vironment. From our ancestors we get all the pos- 
sibilities of our lives. To a certain extent we are 
slaves to our heredity, but not by any means to any 
such extent as to make us hopeless, unless our hered- 
ity is miserably bad. To the great mass of us come 
larger potentialities than we ever develop, and such 
