He who is born poor, obviously by no fault of his own, may be endowed by Nature with artistic or scientific genius, but if his patrimony is insufficient to enable him to triumph in the first struggles for development and to complete his education, or if he has not, like the shepherd Giotto, the luck to meet with a rich Cimabue, he must inevitably vanish in oblivion in the great prison of wage-slavery, and society itself thus loses treasures of intellectual power.[11]

He who is born rich, although he owes his fortune to no personal exertion, even if his mental capacity is below normal, will play a leading role on the stage of life’s theatre, and all servile people will heap praise and flattery upon him, and he will imagine, simply because he has money, that he is quite a different person from what in reality he is.[12]

When property shall have become collective, that is to say, under the socialist regime, every one will be assured of the means of existence, and the daily labor will simply serve to give free play to the special aptitudes, more or less original, of each individual, and the best and most fruitful (potentially) years of life will not be completely taken up, as they are at present, by the grievous and tragic battle for daily bread.

Socialism will assure to every one a human life; it will give each individual true liberty to manifest and develop his or her own physical and intellectual individuality—­individualities which they bring into the world at birth and which are infinitely varied and unequal.  Socialism does not deny inequality; it merely wishes to utilize this inequality as one of the factors leading to the free, prolific and many-sided development of human life.

FOOTNOTES: 

[3] J. De Johannis, Il concetto dell’equaglianza nel socialismo e nella scienza, in Rassegna delle scienza sociali, Florence, March 15, 1883, and more recently, Huxley, “On the Natural Inequality of Men,” in the “Nineteenth Century,” January, 1890.

[4] Utopian socialism has bequeathed to us as a mental habit, a habit surviving even in the most intelligent disciples of Marxian socialism, of asserting the existence of certain equalities—­the equality of the two sexes, for example—­assertions which cannot possibly be maintained.

BEBEL, Woman in the Past, Present and Future.

Bebel, the propagandist and expounder of Marxian theories, also repeats this assertion that, from the psycho-physiological point of view, woman is the equal of man, and he attempts to refute, without success, the scientific objections that have been made to this thesis.

Since the scientific investigations of Messrs. Lombroso and Ferrero, embodied in Donna delinquente, prostituta e normale, Turin, 1893 (This book has been translated into English, if my memory serves me right.—­Tr.), one can no longer deny the physiological and psychological inferiority of woman to man.  I have given a Darwinian explanation of this fact (Scuola positiva, 1893, Nos. 7-8), that Lombroso has since completely accepted (Uomo di genio, 6e edit, 1894.  This book is also available in English, I believe.—­Tr.) I pointed out that all the physio-psychical characteristics of woman are the consequences of her great biological function, maternity.