PROLEGOMENA 75 



As it is only in the latter group that any thing com- 

 parable to the struggle for existence in the state of nature 

 can take place; as it is only among this twentieth 

 of the whole people that numerous men, women, and 

 children die of rapid or slow starvation, or of the diseases 

 incidental to permanently bad conditions of life; and 

 as there is nothing to prevent their multiplication before 

 they are killed off, while, in spite of greater infant mor- 

 tality, they increase faster than the rich; it seems 

 clear that the struggle for existence in this class can have 

 no appreciable selective influence upon the other 95 per 

 cent, of the population. 



What sort of a sheep breeder would he be who should 

 content himself with picking out the worst fifty out of a 

 thousand, leaving them on a barren common till the 

 weakest starved, and then letting the survivors go back 

 to mix with the rest? And the parallel is too favourable; 

 since in a large number of cases, the atual poor and 

 the convicted criminals are neither the weakest nor the 

 worst. 



In the struggle for the means of enjoyment, the qual- 

 ities which insure success are energy, industry, intellec- 

 tual capacity, tenacity of purpose, and, at least, as much 

 sympathy as is necessary to make a man understand the 

 feelings of his fellows. Were there none of those arti- 

 ficial arrangements by which fools and knaves are kept 

 at the top of society instead of sinking to their natural 

 place at the bottom, 26 the struggle for the means of 

 enjoyment would ensure a constant circulation of the 

 human units of the social compound, from the bottom 

 to the top and from the top to the bottom. The sur- 

 vivors of the contest, those who continued to form the 



26 I have elsewhere lamented the absence from society of a 

 machinery for facilitating the descent of incapacity. "Admin- 

 istrative Nihilism." Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 54. [T. H. H.] 



