ish, by Swan
Sonnenschein, London,) and in _Les Principes de 1789 et le Socialisme_,
Paris, 1894.

XI.

THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY.

The conclusion of the preceding chapter will be of use to us in the
examination of the second contradiction that, it is pretended, exists
between socialism and the theory of evolution. It is asserted and
repeated in all possible tones that socialism constitutes a tyranny
under a new form which will destroy all the blessings of liberty won
with such toil and difficulty in our century, at the cost of so many
sacrifices and of so many martyrs.

I have already shown, in speaking of anthropological inequalities, that
socialism will, on the contrary, assure to all individuals the
conditions of a human existence and the possibility of developing with
the utmost freedom and completeness their own respective
individualities.

It is sufficient here for me to refer to another law, which the
scientific theory of evolution has established, to demonstrate (since I
cannot in this monograph enter into details) that it is an error to
assume that the advent of socialism would result in the suppression of
the vital and vitalizing part of personal and political liberty.

It is a law of natural evolution, set forth and illustrated with
remarkable clearness by M. Ardigo[55], that each succeeding phase of
the natural and social evolution does not destroy the vital and
life-giving manifestations of the preceding phases, but that, on the
contrary, it preserves their existence in so far as they are vital and
only eliminates their pathological manifestations.

In the biological evolution, the manifestations of vegetable life do not
efface the first glimmerings of the dawn of life that are seen even
before in the crystallization of minerals, any more than the
manifestations of animal life efface those of vegetable life. The human
form of life also permits the continued existence of the forms and links
which precede it in the great series of living beings, but, more than
this, the later forms only really live in so far as they are the product
of the primitive forms and co-exist with them.

The social evolution follows the same law: and this is precisely the
interpretation of transition periods given by scientific evolutionism.
They did not annihilate the conquests of the preceding civilizations,
but they preserved, on the contrary, whatever was vital in them and
fecundated them for