he formula of communism may then be
a more remote ideal, when collectivism shall have been completely
realized by the historical processes which I will consider further on.

We are now in a position to conclude that there is no contradiction
between socialism and Darwinism on the subject of the equality of all
men. Socialism has never laid down this proposition and like Darwinism
its tendency is toward a better life for individuals and for society.

This enables us also to reply to this objection, too often repeated,
that socialism stifles and suppresses human individuality under the
leaden pall of collectivism, by subjecting individuals to uniform
monastic regulations and by making them into so many human bees in the
social honey-comb.

Exactly the opposite of this is true. Is it not obvious that it is under
the present bourgeois organization of society that so many
individualities atrophy and are lost to humanity, which under other
conditions might be developed to their own advantage and to the
advantage of society as a whole? To-day, in fact, apart from some rare
exceptions, every man is valued for what he _possesses_ and not for what
he _is_.[10]

He who is born poor, obviously by no fault of his own, may be endowed by
Nature with artistic or scientific genius, but if his patrimony is
insufficient to enable him to triumph in the first struggles for
development and to complete his education, or if he has not, like the
shepherd Giotto, the luck to meet with a rich Cimabue, he must
inevitably vanish in oblivion in the great prison of wage-slavery, and
society itself thus loses treasures of intellectual power.[11]

He who is born rich, although he owes his fortune to no personal
exertion, even if his mental capacity is below normal, will play a
leading role on the stage of life's theatre, and all servile people will
heap praise and flattery upon him, and he will imagine, simply because
he _has_ money, that he is quite a different person from what in reality
he _is_.[12]

When property shall have become collective, that is to say, under the
socialist regime, every one will be assured of the means of existence,
and the daily labor will simply serve to give free play to the special
aptitudes, more or less original, of each individual, and the best and
most fruitful (potentially) years of life will not be completely taken
up, as they are at present, by the grievous and tragic battle for daily
bread.

Socialism will