Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/864

 their fears and the greed of others can do so well, what will be their productivity and cheer when the "interest of all" sings them to their work?

Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution

(This work of the great Russian scientist is a most important contribution to modern thought, overthrowing as it does the old-fashioned view of "Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin," which was the basis of early biologic teaching and is still the basis of all bourgeois economic ideas)

As soon as we study animals—not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and prairie, in the steppe and in the mountains—we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development and bodily organization. If the number