time: the refreshing river 



just too bad for competitive capitalism. Like the dinosaurs, it was 

 getting a little out of date. 



All this, however, was quite beyond the grasp of most Victorian 

 writers and thinkers. All they could see was that the struggle for 

 existence was, as they would have put it, the universal law of life, 

 and that the more red in tooth and claw life could be made in the 

 industrial areas, the more would human civilisation benefit. In other 

 words, the struggle for existence supplied the grandest argument 

 yet available for the necessity of laissei-faire capitalism. While it 

 lasted, the going was good, but inconvenient critics such as Kropotkin, 

 in his Mutual Aid, demonstrated the large part played in evolution 

 by animal associations including the colonial hymenoptera. Drummond 

 traced the origins of altruism back to the beginnings of the family 

 and the factors involved in primitive reproduction. Darwin himself, 

 though emphasising the competition between species and individuals, 

 had not overlooked the co-operative element. In his Descent of Man}- 

 he said, "Those communities which included the greatest number of 

 the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the 

 greatest number of offspring." And as for human society, Marx and 

 Engels, by their historical analysis, showed that capitalism had not 

 always existed, and that there was no reason whatever to think that 

 free competition in exploitation of commodities and labour was more 

 than a stage in man's evolution towards a planned and rationally 

 controlled society. 



A third case of systematic distortion and falsification of scientific 

 ideas would be found in the whole history of racialistic theories from 

 Gobineau onwards. While completely contrary to all the most solidly 

 established scientific knowledge about human beings, these theories 

 have played an enormous part in the political life of the twentieth 

 century. We will not further consider them here. 



Distortions of science may also occur in the interests of sections 

 of the ruling class. Thus the patent medicine trade and pseudo- 

 scientific advertising come to mind. Professor A. J. Clark's exposure^ 

 of the former in 1938 revealed the colossal annual financial turnover 

 which the business of battening on the people's ill-health achieves; 

 at that time about equivalent to the national annual public expenditure 

 on hospitals. Exposures, however, are few, since the patent medicine 

 trade constitutes the greatest single advertiser in the daily newspapers, 

 and is therefore in a position to exert overriding influence against the 



^ Ch. 4, p. 163. ^ "Patent Medicines," Fact, 1938, No. 14. 



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