he seemed to have no power of observation: there was not a fact in Das
Kapital that had not been taken out of a book, nor a discussion that had
not been opened by somebody else's pamphlet. No matter: he exposed the
bourgeoisie and made an end of its moral prestige. That was enough: like
Darwin he had for the moment the World Will by the ear. Marx had, too,
what Darwin had not: implacability and a fine Jewish literary gift,
with terrible powers of hatred, invective, irony, and all the bitter
qualities bred, first in the oppression of a rather pampered young
genius (Marx was the spoilt child of a well-to-do family) by a social
system utterly uncongenial to him, and later on by exile and poverty.
Thus Marx and Darwin between them toppled over two closely related
idols, and became the prophets of two new creeds.

WHY DARWIN PLEASED THE PROFITEERS ALSO

But how, at this rate, did Darwin succeed with the capitalists too? It
is not easy to make the best of both worlds when one of the worlds is
preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it. The
explanation is that Darwinism was so closely related to Capitalism that
Marx regarded it as an economic product rather than as a biological
theory. Darwin got his main postulate, the pressure of population on
the available means of subsistence, from the treatise of Malthus
on Population, just as he got his other postulate of a practically
unlimited time for that pressure to operate from the geologist Lyell,
who made an end of Archbishop Ussher's Biblical estimate of the age
of the earth as 4004 B.C. plus A.D. The treatises of the Ricardian
economists on the Law of Diminishing Return, which was only the
Manchester School's version of the giraffe and the trees, were all very
fiercely discussed when Darwin was a young man. In fact the discovery in
the eighteenth century by the French Physiocrats of the economic
effects of Commercial Selection in soils and sites, and by Malthus of
a competition for subsistence which he attributed to pressure of
population on available subsistence, had already brought political
science into that unbreathable atmosphere of fatalism which is the
characteristic blight of Darwinism. Long before Darwin published a line,
the Ricardo-Malthusian economists were preaching the fatalistic Wages
Fund doctrine, and assuring the workers that Trade Unionism is a vain
defiance of the inexorable laws of political economy, just as the
Neo-Darwinians were pre