ld at large, the author who can do anything else has no right to
write for the average man. There are plenty of people who cannot help
writing for him. Let them do it. It is their right and the world's right
that they should be the ones to do it. It is the place that belongs to
them, and why should nearly every man we have of the more seeing kind
to-day deliberately compete with men who cannot compete with him? The
man who abandons the life that belongs to him,--the life that would not
exist in the world if he did not live it and keep it existing in the
world, and who does it to help his inferiors, does not help his
inferiors. He becomes their rival. He crowds them out of their lives.
There could not possibly be a more noble, or more exact and spiritual
law of progress than this--that every man should take his place in human
society and do his work in it with his nearest spiritual neighbours.
These nearest spiritual neighbours are a part of the economy of the
universe. They are now and always have been the natural conductors over
the face of the earth of all actual power in it. It has been through the
grouping of the nearest spiritual neighbours around the world that men
have unfailingly found the heaven-appointed, world-remoulding teachers
of every age.

It does not sound very much like Thomas Jefferson,--and it is to be
admitted that there are certain lines in our first great national
document which, read on the run at least, may seem to deny it,--but the
living spirit of Thomas Jefferson does not teach that amputation is
progress, nor does true Democracy admit either the patriotism or the
religion of a man who feels that his legs must be cut off to run to the
assistance of neighbours whose legs are cut off. An educational
Democracy which expects a pupil to be less than himself for the benefit
of other pupils is a mock Democracy, and it is the very essence of a
Democracy of the truer kind that it expects every man in it to be more
than himself. And if a man's religion is of the truer kind, it will not
be heard telling him that he owes it to God and the Average Man to be
less than himself.

VI

Natural Selection in Practice

It is not going to be possible very much longer to take it for granted
that natural selection is a somewhat absent-minded and heathen habit
that God has fallen into in the natural world, and uses in his dealings
with men, but that it is not a good enough law for men to use in their
dealings