Fortunately or unfortunately, however, the social evolution of _Homo Europeus_ during, let us say, the last three or four centuries, has been vastly more rapid than any strictly biological evolution can possibly be. Inevitably, therefore, the bodily structure of man and his equipment of natural instincts, has of late years tended to fall behind the demands of civilization. Witness, for example, the professional man who falls in love at twenty, but must wait till thirty before he can support a wife; or the inconvenient superfluity of bone, muscle and lung in many an office worker. One notes incidentally how much better fitted for civilization, both in mind and body, women are than men. They were, the ethnologists tell us, civilized first. Certain of the gang instincts, therefore, tend to fit the growing boy for conditions which no longer obtain, rather than for those which he will actually have to face as a man. To no small extent, the ancient virtues of savagery have become vices of civilization, so that the instincts on which they are based are by no means desirable in a modern boy. Consider, for example, the “plaguing people” which, as we have seen, occurs in forty-four of our sixty-six reports. This is, of course, sheer savagery. “Most savages,” as Darwin says, “are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of strangers, or even delight in witnessing them”; and the modern boy does not fall far behind the ancient savage as every Chinaman and Jew and policeman can testify. The gang considers it the proper thing also to attack and misuse every strange boy who appears in its precincts. It gets no small part of its pleasure in giving displeasure to others. Yet, after all, the cruelty of our savage forefathers was a hard necessity. A little tribe, perpetually fighting for its life against its rivals, could not afford to be sympathetic toward the discomfort of outsiders. In the primitive struggle for existence, the kindly tribe would pretty certainly be beaten by the cruel one. So the boy is cruel and plagues people. But his cruelty is largely collective rather than individual, like that of the wolf rather than the tiger. As his ganginess fades with later adolescence, much of his native barbarity will go with it. Till that time comes, the wise adult will not attribute to thoroughgoing depravity what is only a temporary stage in the boy’s psychic evolution. In part, therefore, the boy comes honestly by his teasing instincts. But “plaguing people” arises in part also from race prejudice; and so far as it does thus arise, it is entirely the fault of us adults. Boys, untaught, have no prejudice against any particular kind of stranger, so that the fault being ours, the remedy is quite in our own hands.