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 almost 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.
But a wise ordinance of Nature has decreed that
in proportion as the working-classes increase in intelligence,
knowledge, and all virtue, in that same proportion their
acute angle (which makes them physically terrible)
shall increase also and approximate to their
comparatively harmless angle of the Equilateral Triangle.
Thus, in the most brutal and formidable off the soldier class--
creatures almost on a level with women in their lack of intelligence--
it is found that, as they wax in the mental ability necessary
to employ their tremendous penetrating power to advantage,
so do they wane in the power of penetration itself.