No riches and influence can buy exemption from Nature.
Law says to the poor man who is dependent on his daily toil: "You have only yourself to rely upon. Take care of your health; be temperate, honest and industrious, for sickness, imprisonment, idleness, mean to you death."
It says to the rich man: "Inherited wealth has exempted you from daily labor of body, but it has not earned for you rest. Go to work; do something, or your mind and body will be enfeebled; your sympathies will disappear; you will become dry as the summer's dust; you will sink into a nonentity."
The whole cry of Nature's law is onward and upward. Evolution is the word—there is no God about it. It is not alone the survival of the fittest—that is only a part of the process. It is the fittest of one generation becoming something better and higher for the next.
It is the fashion now to say that the struggle for existence becomes yearly more fierce, but that is not so. The truth is that those who struggle become with each survival fitter to struggle, and that for which they struggle is placed one step forward. Men used to want thousands and hundreds of thousands; now, they want millions and hundreds of millions. They used to want general knowledge; now, they are all specialists, and cry out that life is too short. Steam used to content them; now, electricity does not satisfy them, and they are grasping at the possibilities of the mighty currents of air caused by the revolutions of the earth itself.
The law of progress is not limited to the mind. The body shares in it. Men are stronger, larger, longer-lived than they have ever been. Even with the animals, finer, better breeds are constantly producing themselves under law.
This law of the survival of the fittest and the elevation of the type of the fittest pronounced against slavery, and a nation paid the penalty in blood, as Spain has, and other nations will pay it. It has pronounced against the subjection of women, and let those who stand in the way, beware, lest some ruin crush them as it falls!
The type of sympathy has become higher and tenderer. Sweet hands of mercy are now stretched down even to the brutes. Let those lovers of the past who can see no progress in the present, who would question this onward tendency, and the result of law, let them remember that they must run rapidly to keep from being overwhelmed by the expansionists.
Nature's law teaches us that like begets like. You plant a grain of wheat, and you reap wheat. You breed Morgan stock and the foal is of Morgan blood. The child is the offspring of certain parents, and it inherits their blood. If parents choose to unfit themselves to be healthy parents, who shall be blamed?