Quotation from: War of the Classes

Written by: Jack London


Man, preeminent though he is in the animal kingdom, capable of
reacting upon and making suitable an unsuitable environment,
nevertheless remains the creature of this same law of development.
The social selection to which he is subject is merely another form
of natural selection. True, within certain narrow limits he
modifies the struggle for existence and renders less precarious the
tenure of life for the weak. The extremely weak, diseased, and
inefficient are housed in hospitals and asylums. The strength of
the viciously strong, when inimical to society, is tempered by penal
institutions and by the gallows. The short-sighted are provided
with spectacles, and the sickly (when they can pay for it) with
sanitariums. Pestilential marshes are drained, plagues are checked,
and disasters averted. Yet, for all that, the strong and the
progeny of the strong survive, and the weak are crushed out. The
men strong of brain are masters as of yore. They dominate society
and gather to themselves the wealth of society. With this wealth
they maintain themselves and equip their progeny for the struggle.
They build their homes in healthful places, purchase the best
fruits, meats, and vegetables the market affords, and buy themselves
the ministrations of the most brilliant and learned of the
professional classes. The weak man, as of yore, is the servant, the
doer of things at the master's call. The weaker and less efficient
he is, the poorer is his reward. The weakest work for a living
wage, (when they can get work), live in unsanitary slums, on vile
and insufficient food, at the lowest depths of human degradation.
Their grasp on life is indeed precarious, their mortality excessive,
their infant death-rate appalling.

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Old Dominion University CS Dept
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Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.