He is then immediately taken
from his proud yet sorrowing parents and adopted by some childless
Equilateral, who is bound by oath never to permit the child henceforth
to enter his former home or so much as to look upon his relations
again, for fear lest the freshly developed organism may, by force of
unconscious imitation, fall back again into his hereditary level.
The occasional emergence of an Equilateral from the ranks of his
serf-born ancestors is welcomed, not only by the poor serfs
themselves, as a gleam of light and hope shed upon the monotonous
squalor of their existence, but also by the Aristocracy at large; for
all the higher classes are well aware that these rare phenomena, while
they do little or nothing to vulgarize their own privileges, serve as
amost useful barrier against revolution from below.
Had the acute-angled rabble been all, without exception,
absolutely destitute of hope and of ambition, they might have found
leaders in some of their many seditious outbreaks, so able as to
render their superior numbers and strength too much even for the
wisdom of the Circles.
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