CHAPTER II. 



THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS. 



There is absolutely no foundation for the 

 first of the objections made to socialism in 

 the name of Darwinism. 



If it were true that socialism aspires to the 

 equality of all individuals, it would be correct 

 to assert that Darwinism condemns it irre- 

 vocably. 



But though people even to-day fluently 

 / repeat some in good faith, like parrots that 

 recite ready-made phrases, others in bad faith 

 and through polemical dexterity that social- 

 ism is synonymous with equality and level- 

 ling, the truth is, on the contrary, that 

 scientific socialism that which is inspired by 

 the theory of Marx, and which alone deserves 

 at the present day to be defended or attacked 

 has never denied the inequality of indi- 

 viduals as of all living beings an inequality 

 innate and acquired, physical and moral.f 



* J. de Johannis, II concetto dell' eguaglianza nel 

 socialismo e nella scienza, in Rassegna delle scienze 

 sociali. Florence, i5th March, 1883, and more recently 

 Huxley, On the Natural Inequality of Man in the 

 Nineteenth Century, January, 1890. 



t Utopian Socialism has left as a mental habit, even 

 with the most convinced followers of Marxian socialism, 

 the affirmation of certain inequalities the equality of the 

 two sexes for example which cannot be sustained in any 

 manner. Rebel ( Woman in the Past, Present and Future, 

 trans. London, 1885), the propagandist and apostle of 

 Marxian theories, this clever and eloquent strategist of 

 democratic socialism, still repeats the affirmation that 



