This is the biological foundation of that environment philosophy which now pervades all our thinking. Change the physical environment, says the biologist, and the species will be transformed. Change the economic environment, says the Socialist, and, if you make the right change, the race will be redeemed. Both statements rest on the same fundamental laws.
As the many and highly important implications of this theory, are fully dealt with in subsequent lectures most of them will be passed here.
We may note however, that whenever any nation in the modern world, produces, in the development of its industry, a Socialistic variation, that new feature at once proves its utility and is “selected” in the Darwinian sense, because it constitutes an advantage over the previous form of social organization, in that particular. This is the reason why the trust--which is socialistic and revolutionary in its essential tendences--is always victorious, in spite of the foolish ravings of the Hearst newspapers and the antediluvian twaddle of William Jennings Bryan.
But Darwin’s crowning achievement is that he made the general theory of evolution impregnable by thoroughly and conclusively demonstrating it in his own field as a naturalist. From then on it was only a question of time as to when its application would be universal.
Socialism may be defined as the application of the theory of evolution to the phenomena of society. This is precisely what Marx and Engels accomplished, and this why their work is so fundamentally opposed to the conventional theories and theological superstitious current in their time, and so fully in harmony with all the latest achievements in the scientific world. History ceases to be a meaningless mass of war and famine, bloodshed and cruelty. It becomes a panorama presenting the development of society according to laws which may be understood and with a future that may be measurably predicted.
It develops by the operation of forces that no man or class can wholly stay or hinder. The power of those forces and the direction in which they are now making has been well set forth by Victor Hugo by a very striking simile in the following passage:
“We are in Russia. The Neva is frozen. Heavy carriages roll upon its surface. They improvise a city. They lay out streets. They build houses. They buy. They sell. They laugh. They dance. They permit themselves anything. They even light fires on this water become granite. There is winter, there is ice and they shall last forever. A gleam pale and wan spreads over the sky and one would say that the sun is dead. But no, thou art not dead, oh Liberty! At an hour when they have most profoundly forgotten thee; at a moment when they least expect thee, thou shall arise, oh, dazzling sight! Thou shalt shoot thy bright and burning rays, thy heat, thy life, on all this mass of ice become hideous and dead. Do you hear that dull thud, that crackling, deep and dreadful? ’Tis the Neva tearing loose. You said it was granite. See it splits like glass. ’Tis the breaking of the ice, I tell you. ’Tis the water alive, joyous and terrible. Progress recommences. ’Tis humanity again beginning its march. ’Tis the river which retakes its course, uproots, mangles, strikes together, crushes and drowns in its waves not only the empire of upstart Czar Nicholas, but all of the relics of ancient and modern despotism. That trestle work floating away? It is the throne. That other trestle? It is the scaffold. That old book, half sunk? It is the old code of capitalist laws and morals. That old rookery just sinking? It is a tenement house in which wage slaves lived. See these all pass by; passing by never more to return; and for this immense engulfing, for this supreme victory of life over death, what has been the power necessary? One of thy looks, oh, sun! One stroke of thy strong arm, oh, labor!”