In human society the process continues. Out of the tapeworm nature, the tiger nature, the wolf nature, the simian nature, human nature evolves. Repeated episodes of subjugation and suppression mixed with countless incidents of predaceous cupidity and rapacity have made Man what he is today. Indeed, by a sort of instinct, society has constructed its institutions upon empirical observations and assumptions agreeing with this principle. The deductions concerning human nature and human traits that an interplanetary visitor would draw from a study of our common law would be at least slightly humiliating to our incorrigible pride. Law courts, codes of civil contract and criminal procedure, the systems of subordination in armies and navies, castes and classes, men and women, employers and employees, teachers and pupils, parents and children, are based upon the fundamental, the conservative axiom that man, especially the common plain man (Lincoln's phrase), is a being incurably lazy, stupid, dishonest, muddled, cowardly, greedy, restless, obsessed with a low cunning and a selfish callousness and insensibility to the sufferings of his fellow creatures, animal and human. Why is it that Man, the noblest creature of creation, made in the image of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a Christ, a Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so described, not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and Mark Twain, but by the common law, the common opinion, the common assumptions of mankind? Because the development of slavery and parasitism in human society, the subjection of the weak to the strong, the dull and base to the clever and headstrong, set up a vicious cycle: the liberation of more energy for the making of more and more slaves and the propagation of slaves and slave qualities in a geometrically increasing proportion. This might be called the _Malthusian law of slavery_. For the qualities that I have named as man's own characterization of himself are the qualities of the slave and the slave-soul. Nietzche took great pains to repeat ad nauseam that these qualities were the qualities of the slave. But by burdening himself with the hypothesis, evolved from his inner consciousness, that the slaves imposed from below a morality of weakness upon their masters, he missed the really obvious process by which slaves beget more slaves, slavery begets more slavery, and the slave-soul becomes universal. That process is the simple action of physical and spiritual reproduction of the slaves. The subnormal begets the subnormal, the inferior begets the inferior.