iches of the social past of the race, is to say that we are the
children of the past in a sense which comes upon us with all the force
that bears in upon the natural heir when he finds his name in will or
law. But there are exceptions. And before we seek the marks of the
legitimacy of our claim to be the heirs of the hundreds of years of
accumulated thought and action, it may be well to advise ourselves as
to the poor creatures who do not enter into the inheritance with us.
They are those who people our asylums, our reformatories, our jails
and penitentiaries; those who prey upon the body of our social life by
demands for charitable support, or for the more radical treatment by
isolation in institutions; indeed, some who are born to fail in this
inheritance are with us no more, even though they were of our
generation; they have paid the penalty which their effort to wrest the
inheritance from us has cost, and the grave of the murderer, the
burglar, the suicide, the red-handed rebel against the law of social
inheritance, is now their resting place. Society then is, when taken
in the widest sense, made up of two classes of people--the heirs who
possess and the delinquents by birth or conduct who have forfeited the
inheritance.

We may get a clear idea of the way a man attains his social heritage
by dropping figure for the present and speaking in the terms of plain
natural science. Ever since Darwin propounded the law of Natural
Selection the word Variation has been current in the sense explained
on an earlier page.

The student in natural science has come to look for variations as the
necessary preliminary to any new step of progress and adaptation in
the sphere of organic life. Nature, we now know, is fruitful to an
extraordinary degree. She produces many specimens of everything. It is
a general fact of reproduction that the offspring of plant or animal
is quite out of proportion in numbers to the parents that produce
them, and often also to the means of living which await them. One
plant produces seeds which are carried far and near--to the ocean and
to the desert rocks, no less than to the soil in which they may take
root and grow. Insects multiply at a rate which is simply
inconceivable to our limited capacity for thinking in figures. Animals
also produce more abundantly, and man has children in numbers which
allow him to bury half his offspring yearly and yet increase the adult
population from year to year. This me