186   HISTORIC GROWTH OF MAN.

SURVIVAL OF THE BEST.   187

the capitalists, the great private owners of the present, to be compensated, how paid for all this property ' In answer to this it may well be asked, "Who is to pay the people themselves for what the capitalist system has taken from them and their ancestors through the long centuries, the light and joy of life, liberty and happiness which that system has shut off for a hundred generations?" "The people are but reclaiming their own heritage, and the work of their own hands kept back from them by fraud, artifice and force."

The capitalists obtained it by methods which left the producers to suffer. It will be taken back by methods which will secure to the capitalists all the good things that any one else has in the nation. The people have already paid three or four times over for the great railway lines of the United States. " What about inherited wealth-"' - An inherited disease is not health ; an inherited wrong is not thereby changed to a right.

The people are often told that " the working classes are better off now than they were sixty years ago." But they are not as well off in proportion to what their labor produces. The great mass of the wealth goes into fewer and fewer hands. In the United States it becomes more and more difficult to get employment. The people were not "well" off sixty years ago, and you cannot have a "better" without a "well."

The rich, on an average, are not more selfish than the workers. The majority of them have gone into wealth-getting without a thought that there was anything wrong about it, The system of wages and

profits, the big fish eating the little ones, this was

approved by ages of use. Almost anyone of these

workmen would get rich out of others' labor if he had

a chance. It was easy not to see the inherent badness

of the system which heaped up wealth for the few to spend, while the many moiled in the narrowness of

poverty.

In the nineteenth century it was quite the thing for a man to amass great wealth and then give large sums to found colleges or public libraries or in large charities. In this way these men persuaded themselves, and the public as well, that they were benevolent and large hearted. But the wealth thus used did not go back to those men whose hard labor had been the chief thing in its production. Oh, no indeed. It did help to blind the public to the vicious defects of the whole system of ownership, a system that forever leaves the toiler defeated in the struggle for existence. The sociologist might seek to comfort him with the idea that it was nature's law, "the survival of the fittest." But that pitiless law does not mean "the survival of the best." It does mean the triumph and survival of narrow selfishness, of faculties which mark the beast but not the god in man. It means a practical denial of human brotherhood. It means at once a denial and a perversion of the great law of mutual dependence which binds all parts of the social organism together, so that you cannot injure one part without also injuring the other parts; that law of the division of labor which has made civilization itself possible, with all its wealth of resources.

That law of mutual, responsive life, deep-rooted in the geologic ages, will at last assert its full power,