Some have cynically said that these lives are not worth saving, that the death-rate shows the defeat of the unfit, and that if all survived there would not be enough for them to live on. But except in the worst cases--where sots and criminals have bred human weeds--no man is wise enough to select the "fit" from the "unfit" amongst the children. The thin, pale child killed by cold, by hunger, by smallpox, or by fever, may be a seedling Stephenson, or Herschel, or Wesley; and I take it that in the West End the parents would not be consoled for the sacrifice of their most delicate child by the brutal suggestion that it was one of the "unfit." The "fit" may be a hooligan, a sweater, a fraudulent millionaire, a dissolute peer, or a fool. But there are two sides to this question of physical fitness. To excuse the evils of society on the ground that they weed out the unfit, is as foolish as to excuse bad drainage on the same plea. In a low-lying district where the soil is marshy the population will be weeded swiftly; but who would offer that as a reason why the land should not be drained? This heartless, fatuous talk about the survival of the fittest is only another example of the insults to which the poor are subjected. It fills one with despair to think that working men--fathers and husbands--will read or hear such things said of their own class, and not resent them. It is the duty of every working man to fight against such pitiless savagery, and to make every effort to win for his class and his family, respect and human conditions of life. Moreover, the shoddy science which talks so glibly about the "weeding out" of little helpless children is too blear-eyed to perceive that the same conditions of inhuman life which destroy the "weeds," _breed_ the weeds. Children born of healthy parents in healthy surroundings are not weeds. But to-day the British race is deteriorating, and the nation is in danger because of the greed of money-seekers and the folly of rulers and of those who claim to teach. The nation that gives itself up to the worship of luxury, wealth, and ease, is doomed. Nothing can save the British race but an awakening of the workers to the dangerous pass to which they have been brought by those who affect to guide and to govern them. But the workers, besides being underpaid, over-taxed, badly housed, and exposed to all manner of hardship, poverty, danger, and anxiety of mind, are also, by those who live upon them, denied respect.