Chapter XXXVIII - Page 2

men who
had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time.
To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was
the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable
mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to
biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were the
unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike
proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the
exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from
her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the same
method that men, aping her, bred race-horses and cucumbers.
Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better
method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with
this particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they
perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the
platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they
counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the
penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos.

So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to
give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform,
as was the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low
voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in
his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five
minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's
five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their
doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and
the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's
time. They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect,
and they listened intently, following every word. He spoke with
fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves
and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers
as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and
enunciated the biological law of development.

"And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of
the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still
holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong
and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and
the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result
is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so
long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation
increases. That is development. But you slaves - it is too bad to
be slaves, I grant - but you slaves dream of a society where the
law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and
inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as