observe that here the process of adapting life to its environment
assumes a new and higher phase. In the lower animal world the
life-sustaining activities are individual. Division of labor is either
entirely absent or plays a part so unimportant that we may for purposes
of comparison assume its absence. The individual animal has free access
to surrounding nature, unrestrained by social institutions or private
property in the environment. For the members of a given group there is
what may be described as equality of opportunity. Hence it follows that
the individuals which are best suited to the environment will thrive
best and will tend to crowd out the others.

But when we come to human society this is not necessarily true. Here a
social environment has been created--a complex fabric of laws, usages,
and institutions which envelopes completely the life of the individual
and intervenes everywhere between him and physical nature. To this all
his industrial activities must conform. The material environment is no
longer the common possession of the group. It has become private
property and has passed under the control of individuals in whose
interests the laws and customs of every community ancient and modern
have been largely molded. This is a fact which all history attests.
Wherever the few acquire a monopoly of political power it always tends
to develop into a monopoly of the means and agents of production. Not
content with making the physical environment their own exclusive
property, the few have often gone farther and by reducing the many to
slavery have established and legalized property in human beings
themselves. But even when all men are nominally free and legalized
coercion does not exist, the fact nevertheless remains that those who
control the means of production in reality control the rest. As Mr. W.H.
Mallock, the uncompromising opponent of democracy and staunch defender
of aristocracy, puts it: "The larger part of the progressive activities
of peace, and the arts and products of civilization, result from and
imply the influence of kings and leaders in essentially the same sense
as do the successes of primitive war, the only difference being that the
kings are here more numerous, and though they do not wear any arms or
uniforms, are incomparably more autocratic than the kings and czars who
do."[199] "Slavery, feudalism, and capitalism," he tells us, "agree with
one another in being systems under which the few"