tal frankness of
modern bourgeois Capitalism, gives us a new definition of Great Men.
According to Mallock, the great man is the man who makes money. This has
long been the working theory of bourgeois society, but Mallock is the
first of them who has had the cynicism or the stupidity to confess it.
But mark you, by this confession he admits the truth of the fundamental
premise of modern scientific socialism, our Socialism, viz., that the
economic factor is the dominant or determining factor in the life of
society. Thus you see the ablest champion of bourgeois capitalism,
admits, albeit unconsciously, the truth of the Marxian materialistic
conception of history. This book, however, is chiefly remarkable for its
impudent and shameless misrepresentations of Marx and Marxism, but these
very lies show that intelligent apologists of capitalism know that their
only dangerous foe is Marxian socialism.

But just as according to the vulgar superstition the tail of a snake
that has been killed wiggles till sundown, so this book of Mallock's is
merely a false show of life made by a theory that received its deathblow
long since. It is the wiggling of the tail of the snake that Herbert
Spencer killed thirty years ago with his little book "The Study of
Sociology." The environment philosophy in one form or another has come
to occupy the entire field of human thought. We now look for the
explanation of every phenomenon in the conditions that surrounded its
birth and development. The best application of this environment
philosophy to intellectual and literary phenomena that has ever been
made is Taine's History of English Literature.

But while Spencer's Study of Sociology is the most signal and brilliant
refutation of the Great Man theory, no one man really killed that
theory. The general spread and acceptance of Darwinism has produced an
intellectual atmosphere in which such a theory can no more live than a
fish can live out of water.

By Darwinism we mean, as you know, the transmutation of species by
variation and natural selection--selection accomplished mainly, if not
solely, by the struggle for existence. Now this doctrine of organic
development and change or metamorphic evolution, which was, with its
originators, Wallace and Darwin, a purely biological doctrine, was
transported to the field of sociology by Spencer and applied with great
power to all human institutions, legal, moral, economic, religious, etc.
Spencer has taught