fe.

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.

II.--In the life of mankind, as in that of plants and animals, the
immense majority of those who are born are destined to perish, because
only a small minority can triumph in the "struggle for existence";
socialism asserts, on the contrary, that all ought to triumph in this
struggle, and that no one is inexorably destined to be conquered.

III.--The struggle for existence assures "the survival of the best, the
victory of the fittest," and this results in an aristocratic hierarchic
gradation of selected individuals--a continuous progress--instead of the
democratic, collectivist leveling of socialism.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] Les preuves du transformisme.--Paris, 1879, page 110 _et seq._

II.

THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS.

The first of the objections, which is brought against socialism in the
name of Darwinism, is absolutely without foundation.

If it were true that socialism aspires to "the equality of all
individuals," it would be correct to assert that Darwinism irrevocably
condemns it.[3]

But although even to-day it is still currently repeated--by some in good
faith, like parrots who recite their stereotyped phrases; by others in
bad faith, with polemical skillfulness--that socialism is synonymous
with equality and leveling; the truth is, on the contrary, that
scientific socialism--the socialism which draws its inspiration from the
theory of Marx, and which alone to-day is worthy of support or
opposition,--has never denied the inequality of individuals, as of all
living beings--inequality innate and acquired, physical and
intellectual.[4]

It is just as if one should say that socialism asserts that a royal
decree or a popular vote could settle it that "henceforth all men shall
be five feet seven inches tall."

But in truth, socialism is something more serious and more difficult to
refute.

Socialism says: _Men are unequal, but they are all_ (of them) _men_.

And, in fact, although each individual is born and develops in a
fashion more or less different from that of all other individuals,--just
as there are not in a forest two leaves identically alike, so in the
whole world there are not two men in all respects equals, the one of the
other,