Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/132

 1 1 8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

labor alone, but accepts the view that capitalism is a mere "historical category," a phase of evolution.

The lecture on Darwinism brings the author to the doctrine of competition. The "struggle for life" among animals is one between different species ; that among men is between two classes in the same species, capitalists and proletarians. Competition among brutes tends to raise life, but among men its tendency is to transform capitalists into decaying parasitic families, and to brutalize wage-earners. Modern anthropology demonstrates that the physical and intellectual advantages of parents are discounted by their successors, and that the descendants of great men are usually idiots who roll in the abyss of folly and degeneration. The nobles of Spain are usually little pale monsters, rachitic and meanly built. English families of the peerage soon die out. Bastards are more likely to be strong than the offspring of mercantile marriages. Capitalism selects women and little children to displace husbands and fathers, because they produce at lower cost ; they hire Poles and Chinese rather than men of a higher standard of life, for the same reason. To leave laboring men to "free competition" would mean to brutalize all the civilized races. The "ferocious con- clusions" of Spencer, who would proscribe legislation on behalf of the poor, are not the conclusions of the new political economy.

Evolution is the word which solves all mysteries. The essence of evolution is the law of constant increase of human population. But social evolution is not merely animal evolution. "The naturalists have fulfilled their whole mission when they have lent to the social sciences the luminous idea which renews them : they pass beyond the limits imposed on the human spirit if they pretend to give the law to the economic and social sciences, and to exhibit the method by which the law of evolution is manifest in them." Mr. Spencer errs at this point ; he is prone to reduce social laws to terms of biology. Loria would reject the distinction of societies as industrial and military, and would adopt a classification based on the prevalent economic forces. Thus the order of evolution of society yields the primitive collectivism, when land was possessed in common ; the stage of slavery ; the stage of serf- dom ; the economy of wage-earners. Under the increasing pressure of population each of these systems becomes antiquated in turn and yields to a higher form. We are in an age when the wage system is no longer suitable. It causes misery. It is ready to fall.

Revolution. If we are to reason from the past there is little hope