BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 91 



I have reserved to the close that biological principle 

 which has been most often and most seriously mis- 

 applied in sociology and politics — the struggle for 

 existence. Never was the proverb about the Devil's 

 quoting Scripture better exemplified than in this 

 matter. This fundamental idea of Darwin's has 

 been used as justification for three totally different 

 and indeed incompatible political doctrines. In 

 England, it has served chiefly to bolster up laissez- 

 faire individualism and free competition. In Germany 

 in the years immediately succeeding the publica- 

 tion of the Origin of Species^ it was seized upon by 

 the Socialists as implying equal opportunity for all as 

 against feudalism or hereditary aristocracy. Later 

 in the same country (and to a certain extent elsewhere) 

 it was abundantly employed as a theoretical support 

 for militarism. 



As a matter of feet, the use of it as sole principle ^ 

 governing the interrelation of biological units is wholly 

 unjustified. As has been shown by a number of 

 writers, among whom may especially be mentioned 

 Darwin himself, Ritchie in his Darwinism and 

 Politics^ and Kropotkin in his Mutual Jid^ the struggle 

 for existence is only one of two possibilities in this 

 relationship : the other is that of co-operation, of 

 mutual aid, which is especially well marked in the 

 building up of higher-grade units from a multiplicity 

 of smaller lower-grade ones. Two of the most <^ 

 important steps in the whole evolutionary process 



