pain to a minimum through the increasing care and sympathetic feeling of society, and also the corresponding increase of ethical pleasure. It can hardly be admitted, however, that this rose-colored outlook over the future of humanity is quite justified by the facts and tendencies cited by the author. For example, the statement that "the severity of the struggle for existence is increased in the social state and grows with the growth of society" is pronounced to be "erroneous" (p. 507). And in evidence of this we are told that "the evils of competition in human society are not greater; they are simply more evident to human beings than the evils elsewhere in nature. The tragedies of the woods are bloody but short; death puts a speedy end to sufferings, and the earth quickly hides the victims. In society, on the other hand, coöperation preserves not only the aged and feeble, the deformed and idiotic, of the more privileged classes, it even suffices to enable the most miserable to drag out a forlorn existence somewhat longer. It forbids the mother who finds her child a burden simply to leave it by the roadside as the savage mother does, and it will give a penny or two against starvation, when it will not bestow enough for comfort." But does not the child of the "civilized" mother, who allows it to drag on a half-starved existence or to perish slowly from want of proper care, suffer far more than the savage babe who is deprived of life at one blow? The former child suffers the more just because modern society will not permit its brutal parent to have recourse to the ruder method of getting rid of it. So with the idiot and the hopelessly diseased; our very care of them prolongs their sufferings. Moreover, civilized society introduces social inequalities unknown to the savage, and if the fortunate ones of our modern communities know pleasures of which their primitive ancestors were ignorant, the condition of our paupers, criminals, and outcasts is probably far more pitiable—there is certainly a far greater consciousness of suffering than is the case with the lower animals or with savages. So, too, when we are told that there is no danger to the future of the human race through overcrowding because, "the fittest will survive; and the fittest will be those who perceive the evils of overcrowding and take active measures to avoid it," we must retort that experience points to the probability that the more prolific races and families will tend to perpetuate themselves, and that it seems likely that those families, whose members from conscientious motives shall abstain from marriage or shall produce few children, will die out. Why should not insanitary overcrowding and a consequent gradual decline in human
