portion as these measures are effective they
amount to a constant virtual addition to the individual's income from
year to year without corresponding effort and forethought on his part.
They may accordingly be condemned as systematic pauperization--the
"endowment of the unfit." There is evidently a fundamental problem here
at issue, apart from all administrative difficulties. Clearly this type
of criticism assumes a permanent incapacity in "human nature" or in most
actual beings therewith endowed, to recognize as seriously important
other interests than those upon which hinge physical life and death. The
ordinary man, it is believed, is held back from moral Quixotism as from
material extravagance by the fear of starvation alone; and it is assumed
that there are no other interests in the "normal" man that can or ever
will be so wholesomely effective to these ends. And two remarks in
answer appear not without a measure of pertinence. First, if what is
alleged be true (and there is evidence in Malthus' _Essay_ and elsewhere
to support it) it seems less a proof of original sin and
"inperfectibility" than a reproach to a social order whose collective
tenor and institutions leave the mass untouched and unawakened above the
level of animal reproduction and whose inequalities of opportunity
prevent awakened life from growing strong. And second, the democratic
society of the future, if it exempts the individual in part or wholly
from the dread of premature physical extinction must leave him on higher
levels of interest similarly dependent for success or failure upon his
ultimate personal discretion. And is it inconceivable that on higher
levels there should ever genuinely be such a persisting type of issue
for the multitude of men?[58]

Sec. 17. We have held constructive comparison in its economic phase to be a
reciprocal evaluating of the "salient members" of two budgets. The
respective budgets in such a case express in the outcome (1) the plane
of life to which one is to move and (2) the plane one is forsaking. It
was the salient member of the former that presented the problem at the
outset. In the course of the process its associates were _gathered
about_ it in their due proportions and perspective. The salient member
of the latter (i.e., whatever the purchase is to oblige one to do
without), it was the business of constructive comparison to _single out_
from among its associates and designate for sacrifice. In any case at
al