192 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



day. The anarchist is simply the man who carries 

 individualism to extremes, insisting that the individ- 

 ual counts for more than society. He claims that 

 each person should be left to obtain for himself all 

 that his powers enable him to obtain, uncurbed by 

 artificial law. The anarchist believes that the whole 

 creation of law and custom has robbed man of his 

 natural rights, and he would make man absolutely 

 free by abolishing law. Socialism too, from a dia- 

 metrically opposite standpoint, has the individual 

 as its foundation. The socialist also places man 

 before society, and he believes also that the laws as 

 they have hitherto developed in civilized commu- 

 nities, instead of benefiting man, have benefited the 

 rulers only, resulting in the enslavement of the great 

 mass of the people, in an industrial if not in a polit- 

 ical slavery. He would remedy the condition, how- 

 ever, by a method the opposite from anarchy, since he 

 would still further increase the power of society. 

 Thus socialism would produce by increasing the law 

 what anarchism would produce by abolishing all law. 

 The results would, to be sure, be vastly different, 

 but both are actuated by the desire to increase the 

 rights of the individual. Socialism would remodel 

 society in such a way as to place the welfare of the 

 individual foremost, and would do this by making 

 laws that would prevent the accumulation of prop- 

 erty, in this way making it impossible for the one to 

 gain possession of the products of the labors of the 

 many. In all modern nations where there are any 

 active opinions upon public affairs the foundation of 

 all agitation is the claim that our present civilization 

 has robbed man of his rights as an individual, and 

 the demand that these rights should be restored him 



