shown that this is the case, then certainly the conditions under which this struggle to the death is carried on would be a matter of supreme importance. Are our social adjustments such as to facilitate, or at least not interfere with it? Do they make the question of success or failure, survival or elimination, depend upon individual fitness or unfitness? This, as we have seen, is not the case, though the partisans of the biological theory of human progress have constantly assumed it. Mr. Mallock takes even a more extreme position than most writers of this class, and actually says "that the social conditions of a time are the same for all, but that it is only exceptional men who can make exceptional use of them."[202] The unequal distribution of wealth he seeks to justify on the ground that "the ordinary man's talents as a producer ... have not appreciably increased in the course of two thousand years and have certainly not increased within the past three generations."[203] "In the domain of modern industrial activity the many" ... he tells us, "produce only an insignificant portion of the total, ... and in the domain of intellectual and speculative progress the many produce or achieve nothing."[204] If we accept his premises, we must agree with his conclusion that democracy's indictment of our modern industrial system falls to the ground. This view of the matter is acceptable, of course, to those who are satisfied with present social arrangements. It furnishes a justification for the system under which they have prospered while others have failed. It relieves their conscience of any misgiving and soothes them with the assurance that only through the poverty and misery of the unfit can a higher civilization be evolved. This largely explains the popularity among the well-to-do classes of such books as Malthus' Principle of Population and Kidd's Social Evolution. Such a treatment of the social problem, however, will not bear the test of analysis, since it assumes that the present distribution of opportunity is just. To ignore or treat as unimportant the influence of social arrangements upon the struggle for existence between individuals, as apologists for the existing social order are too much inclined to do, is like ignoring the modern battle-ship as a factor in the efficiency of the modern navy.