are not. A little reflection will show that it is quite impossible for all to have the best there is. No doubt all the social force in the world is exhausted in sustaining human society at its present level. That force is not all employed as economically as it might be; far from it. But that only throws us back on our true point of view and of effort, viz., to make the wisest use of what we have — to improve our institutions and advance the arts as a means of increasing our social force and to trust to this increase of power to advance civilization. Even then, however, we must understand that some men will absorb to themselves any gain we make and will thus prove themselves the best men. In fact, the advance which we gain, instead of saving and raising the miserable and pitiful victims who are at the bottom, may possibly crowd them out of existence entirely. For instance, if we break up one of the slums of a great city and disperse its poverty-stricken, vicious, and criminal inhabitants who might have festered there for a long time yet, we force them out into open contact with society where they are soon crushed by the competition of life or by the machinery of the law.
Such a line of thought as this, however, is never pursued by the sentimentalist. Seeking a diagnosis of the social evils which he perceives, he notes the preponderant importance of capital in modem society, and he notes the struggle of interests which is involved in the whole structure of our modem industrial system. I have tried elsewhere to show how it is that capital is the backbone of all civilization, and that higher and ever higher organization is essential, as the number of men increases, for the human race to keep up its advancing fight with nature. Consequently the struggle to get capital, to keep it, and to use it, is and must be one of the
