struggle for existence. Rich
people, even though they are less robust, have longer lives than those
who are ill-fed. The day-and-night-work, under inhuman conditions,
imposed upon grown men, and the still more baleful labor imposed upon
women and children by modern capitalism causes a constant deterioration
in the biological conditions of the toiling masses.[23]

In addition to all these we must not forget the moral selection--which
is really immoral or retrograde--made at present by capitalism in its
struggle with the proletariat, and which favors the survival of those
with servile characters, while it persecutes and strives to suppress all
those who are strong in character, and all who do not seem disposed to
tamely submit to the yoke of the present economic order.[24]

The first impression which springs from the recognition of these facts
is that the Darwinian law of natural selection does not hold good in
human society--in short, is inapplicable to human society.

I have maintained, and I do maintain, on the contrary, in the first
place, that these various kinds of retrograde social selection are not
in contradiction with the Darwinian law, and that, moreover, they serve
as the material for an argument in favor of socialism. Nothing but
socialism, in fact, can make this inexorable law of natural selection
work more beneficently.

As a matter of fact, the Darwinian law does not cause the "survival of
the _best_," but simply the "survival of the _fittest_."

It is obvious that the forms of degeneracy produced by the divers kinds
of social selection and notably by the present economic organization
merely promote, indeed, and with growing efficiency, the survival of
those best fitted for this very economic organization.

If the victors in the struggle for existence are the worst and the
weakest, this does not mean that the Darwinian law does not hold good;
it means simply that the environment is corrupt (and corrupting), and
that those who survive are precisely those who are the fittest for this
corrupt environment.

In my studies of criminal psychology I have too often had to recognize
the fact that in prisons and in the criminal world it is the most cruel
or the most cunning criminals who enjoy the fruits of victory; it is
just the same in our modern economic individualist system; the victory
goes to him who has the fewest scruples; the struggle for existence
favors him who is fittest for a world where a man is