maintenance and further development of the
species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of
life for the individual, with the least waste of energy."[90]

From the lowest forms of animal life up to the highest, man, this law
proves to be operative. It is not denied that there is competition for
food, for life, within the species, human and other. But that
competition is not usual; it arises out of unusual and special
conditions. There are instances of hunger-maddened mothers tearing away
food from their children; men drifting at sea have fought for water and
food as beasts fight, but these are not normal conditions of life.
"Happily enough," says Kropotkin again, "competition is not the rule
either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to
exceptional periods.... Better conditions are created by the
_elimination of competition_ by means of mutual aid and mutual
support."[91] This is the voice of science now that we have passed
through the extremes and arrived at the "beautiful goal of calm wisdom."
Competition is not, in the verdict of modern science, the law of life,
but of death. Strife is not nature's way of progress.

Anything more important to our present inquiry than this verdict of
science it would be difficult to imagine. Men have for so long believed
and declared struggle and competition to be the "law of nature," and
opposed Socialism on the ground of its supposed antagonism to that law,
that this new conception of nature's method comes as a vindication of
the Socialist position. The naturalist testifies to the universality of
the principle of cooeperation throughout the animal world, and the
historian and sociologist to its universality throughout the greatest
part of man's history. Present economic tendencies toward combination
and away from competition, in industry and commerce, appear as the
fulfilling of a great universal law. And the vain efforts of men to stop
that process, by legislation, boycotts, and divers other methods, appear
as efforts to set aside immutable law. Like so many Canutes, they bid
the tides halt, and, like Canute's, their commands are vain and mocked
by the unheeding tides.

Under Communism, then, man lived for many thousands of years. As far
back as we can go into the paleo-ethnology of mankind, we find evidences
of this. All the great authorities, Morgan, Maine, Lubbock, Taylor,
Bachofen, and many others, agree in this. And under this