down to the lowest surviving types of barbarians.
Furthermore, if we analyze the society of the most civilized state,
especially in one of the great cities where the highest triumphs of
culture are presented, we find survivals of every form of barbarism and
lower civilization. Hence, those who today enjoy the most complete
emancipation from the hardships of human life, and the greatest command
over the conditions of existence, simply show us the best that man has
yet been able to do. Can we all reach that standard by wishing for it?
Can we all vote it to each other? If we pull down those who are most
fortunate and successful, shall we not by that very act defeat our own
object? Those who are trying to reason out any issue from this tangle
of false notions of society and of history are only involving
themselves in hopeless absurdities and contradictions. If any man is
not in the first rank who might get there, let him put forth new energy
and take his place. If any man is not in the front rank, although he
has done his best, how can he be advanced at all? Certainly in no way
save by pushing down any one else who is forced to contribute to his
advancement.

It is often said that the mass of mankind are yet buried in poverty,
ignorance, and brutishness. It would be a correct statement of the
facts intended, from an historical and sociological point of view, to
say, Only a small fraction of the human race have as yet, by thousands
of years of struggle, been partially emancipated from poverty,
ignorance, and brutishness. When once this simple correction is made in
the general point of view, we gain most important corollaries for all
the subordinate questions about the relations of races, nations, and
classes.

V.

_THAT WE MUST HAVE FEW MEN, IF WE WANT STRONG MEN._

In our modern revolt against the mediaeval notions of hereditary honor
and hereditary shame we have gone too far, for we have lost the
appreciation of the true dependence of children on parents. We have a
glib phrase about "the accident of birth," but it would puzzle anybody
to tell what it means. If A takes B to wife, it is not an accident that
he took B rather than C, D, or any other woman; and if A and B have a
child, X, that child's ties to ancestry and posterity, and his
relations to the human race, into which he has been born through A and
B, are in no sense accidental. The child's interest in the question
whether A should have married B or C i