The Genesis of the Depressed Classes.--So complex a problem, it might be said at once, cannot manifestly have a simple explanation, yet this has been the mistake of many social thinkers of the past. They have sought some single simple explanation of human misery, and particularly in its form of economic distress or poverty. Malthus, as we have already seen, attributed all human misery to the fact that population tends to increase more rapidly than food supply, and that it is the pressure of population upon food which sufficiently explains poverty in human society. Karl Marx offered an equally sweeping explanation when he attributed all poverty to the fact that labor is not paid a sufficient wage; that the capitalist appropriates an unjust share of the product of labor, leaving to the laborer just enough to maintain existence and reproduce. Henry George in the same spirit, in his _Progress and Poverty_, attributed all poverty to one cause,--the landlord's appropriation of the unearned increment in land values. There is, of course, some truth in all of these sweeping generalizations, but it must be said that there is not sufficient in any of them to stand the test of concrete investigation; rather these men have made the mistake of attempting to explain a very complex social phenomenon in terms of a single set of causes, which, as we have already seen, has been the bane of social science in the past. Even the theory of evolution itself fails to explain, as ordinarily stated, the genesis of the depressed classes in human society. It may explain it in part, however. As we have already seen, biological variations are always found in individuals, making some naturally superior, some naturally inferior, and in the struggle for existence we know that the inferior are more liable to go down; they are less apt to maintain a place in society, and hence more readily fall into the depressed classes. Many well-endowed persons, however, also fall into the dependent classes through accidents and causes inherent in our social organization but in no way natural. Thus, owing to our industrial system and to our laws of property, inheritance, and the like, it often happens that a superior person through sickness or other accident gets caught in a mesh of causes which bring him down to the dependent classes, and on the other hand inferior individuals, through inheritance or "social pull," oftentimes enjoy a very large economic surplus all their lives. It may be admitted, however, that slight defects in personal character or ability enter into practically all cases of dependence. This is more apt to be the case also in a progressive society like our own, where rising standards of efficiency make the economic struggle more severe all the time. Formerly, for example, any employee could drink and retain his position, but now the drinker quickly loses his position in many industries and gives place to the sober man. Oftentimes, however, such defects that