INTRODUCTION. 



Malthus, but also had been organized into an 

 extensive science by John Stuart Mill's work 

 on Political Economy, a gloomy book full of 

 the modern social tragedy. It is still Natural 

 Selection with its remorseless submergence of 

 the weak. From this fateful impression Polit- 

 ical Economy in England has been named the 

 Dismal Science. The same doctrine was car- 

 ried over into Philosophy by Herbert Spencer 

 who first formulated the famous phrase, "the 

 survival of the fittest.' 1 It should be added 

 that in continental America such an insular 

 theory could not arise; the circumstances, so- 

 cial and physical, were wanting. There was 

 still an abundance of land, no limitation of 

 the food supply was visible, and hence no 

 social struggle for existence as in England. 

 It was in place, therefore, that the strongest 

 contradiction of the doctrines of Eicardo, Mal- 

 thus and Mill, should be the work of an Amer- 

 ican economist, Henry C. Carey. Darwin with 

 his theory of Natural Selection could not have 

 originated in the United States, where his 

 social presupposition was wanting; he had to 

 be born not only a European but an English 

 Islander of the nineteenth century, in order to 

 see and perform his task for Nature. Darwin 

 must be seen as an offshoot of the same eco- 

 nomic world which produced Robert Owen 

 with his early socialism as the panacea for 



