Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/207

Rh "Social Statics" was published in 1851; Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" in 1859.

And now I pass to the main issue. In pursuance of his statement that I wish society to adopt the survival of the fittest as its guiding principle, M. de Laveleye goes on to describe what would be its action as applied to mankind. Here are his words:

"This is the ideal order of things which, we are told, ought to prevail in human societies, but everything in our present organization (which economists, and even Mr. Spencer himself, admit, however, to be natural) is wholly opposed to any such conditions. An old and sickly lion captured a gazelle; his younger and stronger brother arrives, snatches away his prize, and lives to perpetuate the species; the old one dies in the struggle, or is starved to death. Such is the beneficent law of the 'survival of the fittest.' It was thus among barbarian tribes. But could such a law exist in our present social order? Certainly not! The rich man, feebly constituted and sickly, protected by the law, enjoys his wealth, marries and has offspring, and if an Apollo of herculean strength attempted to take from him his possessions, or his wife, he would be thrown into prison, and were he to attempt to practise the Darwinian law of selection, be would certainly run a fair risk of the gallows" (p. 492).

Now though, on the next page, M. de Laveleye recognizes the fact that the survival of the fittest, as I construe it in its social applications, is the survival of the industrially superior and those who are fittest for the requirements of social life, yet, in the paragraph I have quoted, he implies that the view I hold would countenance violent methods of replacing the inferior by the superior. Unless he desires to suggest that I wish to see the principle operate among men as it operates among brutes, why did he write this paragraph? In the work before him, without referring to other works, he has abundant proof that, above all things, aggression of every kind is hateful to me; and he scarcely needs telling that from my earliest book, written more than a third of a century ago, down to the present time, I have urged the change of all laws which either inflict injustice or fail to remedy injustice, whether committed by one individual against another, or by class against class, or by people against people. Why, then, did M. de Laveleye make it seem that I would, if I could, establish a reign of injustice under its most brutal form? If there needs proof that in my view the struggle for existence as carried on in society, and the greater multiplication of those best fitted for the struggle, must be subject to rigorous limitations, I may quote as sufficient proof a passage from the "Data of Ethics:" premising that the word co-operation used in it, must be understood in its widest sense, as comprehending all those combined activities by which citizens carry on social life:

"The leading traits of a code under which complete living through voluntary co-operation [here antithetically opposed to compulsory co-operation, characterizing the militant type of society] is secured, may be simply stated. The fundamental requirement is that the life-sustaining actions of each shall