Yet this squares with the first or pyknotic law of energy, as laid down by Vogt.[A] The self-integrating force of one individual is limited by the self-integrating force of all other individuals; which is, if it is anything, Newton’s law working out in human affairs. There is a rough law of balance indicated by this opposition and strain, but nothing more. I once talked with a discouraged, or let us say pessimistic, humanitarian, the twenty best years of whose life had been devoted to corrective and ameliorative work among dependents and defectives, young and old, criminals, the physically undermined and the insane. This man had worked to have various laws passed in various States which would tend to lessen the brutality of their treatment and also to bring about some method whereby their self-reproduction would be painlessly stopped. His idea, after twenty years of experimenting, was that the processes by which the criminal and defectives generally were being gathered and governed and improved, however laudable in theory, was destined to eventually prove economically impossible and so shirked. The tares were too many, too elusive, too expensive to gather and govern. “The thing can’t be done,” I remember his saying. “As society is at present governed or constituted something which is by no means humanitarian or ideal prevails, and in spite of the best intentions of idealists or philanthropists you have the enormous toll of inefficiency and nepotism to contend with. Always the old Adam breaks loose somewhere, and by the time you have investigated and reinvestigated and built institutions and passed laws and elected officials the thing becomes a social and financial burden beyond reckoning--lost,” he added, “in abstrusities and bad management. Politicians juggle with it, and newer reformers or reactionaries undo what you have done. Besides,” he concluded, “normal, healthy men and women do not appear to be able to concern themselves with the day-to-day variations and aberrations of dependent defectives and criminal types. You have the spectacle then of official and even medical neglect, brutality, rotten meat being served to criminals or those detained or cared for--in short, all the horrors that spring from some curious opposition in Nature to anything which is not able to take care of itself. Her plan apparently is to let them die. I tell you that the law of the survival of the strongest cannot be set aside. Any attempt to do so merely begets a vast tangle of effort and expense which results in the final operation of that law anyhow.”