“The selection, the ‘election’ of these ‘elect’ is by absolute necessity bound up with the rejection or destruction of the vast multitude of beings whom they have survived.  And so another learned Englishman has called the fundamental principle of Darwinism ’the survival of the fittest, the victory of the best.’

“At all events, the principle of selection is not in the slightest degree democratic; it is, on the contrary, thoroughly aristocratic.  If, then, Darwinism, carried out to its ultimate logical consequences, has, according to Virchow, for the statesman ’an extraordinarily dangerous side,’ the danger is doubtless that it favors aristocratic aspirations.”

I have reproduced complete and in their exact form all the arguments of Haeckel, because they are those which are repeated—­in varying tones, and with expressions which differ from his only to lose precision and eloquence—­by those opponents of socialism who love to appear scientific, and who, for polemical convenience, make use of those ready-made or stereotyped phrases which have currency, even in science, more than is commonly imagined.

It is easy, nevertheless, to demonstrate that, in this debate, Virchow’s way of looking at the subject was the more correct and more perspicacious, and that the history of these last twenty years has amply justified his position.

It has happened, indeed, that Darwinism and socialism have both progressed with a marvelous power of expansion.  From that time the one was to conquer—­for its fundamental theory—­the unanimous endorsement of naturalists; the other was to continue to develop—­in its general aspirations as in its political discipline—­flooding all the conduits of the social consciousness, like a torrential inundation from internal wounds caused by the daily growth of physical and moral disease, or like a gradual, capillary, inevitable infiltration into minds freed from all prejudices, and which are not satisfied by the merely personal advantages that they derive from the orthodox distribution of spoils.

But, as political or scientific theories are natural phenomena and not the capricious and ephemeral products of the free wills of those who construct and propagate them, it is evident that if these two currents of modern thought have each been able to triumph over the opposition they first aroused—­the strongest kind of opposition, scientific and political conservatism—­and if every day increases the army of their avowed disciples, this of itself is enough to show us—­I was about to say by a law of intellectual symbiosis—­that they are neither irreconcilable with, nor contradictory to, each other.

Moreover, the three principal arguments which form the substance of the anti-socialist reasoning of Haeckel resist neither the most elementary criticisms, nor the most superficial observation of every-day life.

These arguments are: 

I.—­Socialism tends toward a chimerical equality of persons and property:  Darwinism, on the contrary, not only establishes, but shows the organic necessity of the natural inequality of the capabilities and even the wants of individuals.