in this vast, new, restless world, the Great
Society, in which men find themselves but in which they are not yet, and
perhaps never will be, at home.

4. Competition and the "Inner Enemies": the Defectives, the Dependents,
and the Delinquents

Georg Simmel, referring, in his essay on "The Stranger," to the poor and
the criminal, bestowed upon them the suggestive title of "The Inner
Enemies." The criminal has at all times been regarded as a rebel against
society, but only recently has the existence of the dependent and the
defective been recognized as inimical to the social order.[203]

Modern society, so far as it is free, has been organized on the basis of
competition. Since the status of the poor, the criminal, and the
dependent, has been largely determined by their ability or willingness
to compete, the literature upon defectiveness, dependency, and
delinquency may be surveyed in its relation to the process of
competition. For the purposes of this survey the dependent may be
defined as one who is unable to compete; the defective as the person who
is, if not unable, at least handicapped, in his efforts to compete. The
criminal, on the other hand, is one who is perhaps unable, but at any
rate refuses, to compete according to the rules which society lays down.

Malthus' _Essay on the Principle of Population_ first called attention
to the pathological effects of the struggle for existence in modern
society and emphasized the necessity of control, not merely in the
interest of the defeated and rejected members of society, but in the
interest of society itself. Malthus sought a mitigation, if not a
remedy, for the evils of overpopulation by what he called "moral
restraint," that is, "a restraint from marriage, from prudential
motives, with a conduct strictly moral during the period of restraint."
The alternatives were war, famine, and pestilence. These latter have, in
fact, been up to very recent times the effective means through which the
problem of overpopulation has been solved.

The Neo-Malthusian movement, under the leadership of Francis Place,
Richard Carlile, and Robert Dale Owen in the decade of 1820-30 and of
Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in the decade of 1870-80, advocated
the artificial restriction of the family. The differential decline in
the birth-rate, that is, the greater decrease in the number of children
in the well-to-do and educated classes as compared with the poor and
uneducated masses, w