A simple and easily observable sociological fact is at the bottom of the mischief. The different classes in a society have different birth-rates and death-rates, and the differences between these yield their several net rates of increase or decrease. Now, whereas under the conditions of savage life class differences can hardly exist, or, at least cannot be accentuated, so that the whole tribe flourishes or perishes together, and among barbarians the upper classes have a very great advantage and the tribe recruits itself chiefly from the children of the chiefs, because the conditions of life are so severe that the lower classes are not able to rear many children; in civilized societies these conditions are reversed. It is found that though both birth-rates and death-rates grow as we descend the social scale, so does the net rate of increase. Indeed, the highest or ruling class nowhere appears to keep up its numbers without considerable recruitment from below. So society, as at present organized, is always dying off at the top, and proliferating at the bottom, of the social pyramid. The disastrous consequences of this sort of social organization may easily be apprehended, with a little reflection. (1) All societies, even those whose social structure is most rigid, have need of ability, discover it, and reward it by social promotion. But (2) as this promotion means passing into a class with a relatively inadequate rate of reproduction, the biological penalty attaching to social promotion is racial extinction. Thus (3) the ultimate reward of merit is sterilization, and society appears to be an organization devoted to the suicidal task of extirpating any ability it may chance to contain, by draining it away from any stratum in which it may occur, promoting it into the highest, and there destroying it. It is exactly as though a dairyman should set in motion apparatus for separating the cream from the milk, and then, as it rose, skim it off, and throw it away! At present it is calculated that the highest classes in the chief civilized societies only reproduce themselves to the extent of fifty per cent. of their number in each generation, so that the hereditary ability of half of them is lost in each generation. But even then the remainder is largely wasted. It is churned into froth and scum by social forces. For neither now nor at any time has social intelligence shown itself equal to devising a training for the youth of the highest classes that would provide them with adequate stimuli to develop their faculties, and to lead a strenuous life of social service. The children of the rich are tempted to live for ‘society’ in the narrower sense, which means frittering away one’s life on a round of vacuous amusement; and they rarely resist the temptation.