i6 3 



to suppress. For us, on the contrary, this inequality 

 which is a natural effect of social development and which 

 cannot be suppressed has, however, its good side, because 

 it is a means of moral and intellectual progress." 



I abandon the taking up of this gratuitous prophecy 

 that the exaggeration of natural social inequalities caused 

 by the inequalities could not be at all suppressed ; for I 

 occupied myself with that in my book, Socialism and 

 Positive Science. 



I only wish to echo here the assertion that social in- 

 equalities, principally economic, are a "means of moral 

 and intellectual progress," for it receives the most clear 

 contradiction from the most positive data of the most 

 orthodox biology and sociology. 



This assertion of M. Garofalo is completed in fact by 

 this other on page 237, that " hereditary property is 

 actually the sole guarantee of a good education, the only 

 force which still subsists in the world for the selection of 

 individuals, who are not absolutely the strongest from 

 the physical or intellectual point of view, but who are 

 fit by their mental structure to appreciate and preserve 

 the conquests of civilisation. 



Now it is sufficient to remember the conclusion to 

 which such learned men as Lucas, Galton, Morel, Ribot, 

 Jacoby, etc., have arrived on "natural selection in its 

 relations to heredity in man," to know on the contrary 

 that it is a biological fact and historically undeniable 

 that every monopoly of wealth or power is an inevitable 

 source of physical and mental degeneracy. 



The hereditary transmission of an economic or politi- 

 cal privilege consumes, in fact, or wastes away in the 

 descendants every vital energy, and, adding to that the in- 

 evitable abuse of power possessed gratuitously, condemns 

 all aristocracies of blood, or gold, or power, to a succes- 

 sion of physical weakness, psychical degeneracy even to 

 extinction through sterility.' 



This is without reckoning, on the other side, that the 

 monopoly of wealth in a few families has, as an in- 

 separable consequence, misery in many others, and that 

 in this way again it leads to another series of evils and 

 degeneracy. 



There you have progressive selection and the aptitude 

 for preserving the conquests of civilisation ! 



These errors of fact in biological and psychological 

 science are not the only ones. 



In fact, on" page 14, M. Garofalo begins by affirming 

 that the "true tendency of the party called the Working- 



