nts of socialism have made a wrong use of
the Darwinian law or rather of its "brutal" interpretation in order to
justify modern individualist competition which is too often only a
disguised form of cannibalism, and which has made the maxim _homo homini
lupus_ (man to man a wolf; or, freely, "man eats man") the
characteristic motto of our era, while Hobbes only made it the ruling
principle of the "_state of nature_" of mankind, before the making of
the "social contract."

But because a principle has been abused or misused we are not justified
in concluding that the principle itself is false. Its abuse often serves
as an incentive to define its nature and its limitations more
accurately, so that in practice it may be applied more correctly. This
will be the result of my demonstration of the perfect harmony that
reigns between socialism and Darwinism.

As long ago as the first edition of my work _Socialismo e Criminalita_
(pages 179 _et seq._) I maintained that the struggle for existence is a
law immanent in the human race, as it is a law of all living beings,
although its forms continually change and though it undergoes more and
more attenuation.

This is still the way it appears to me, and consequently, on this point
I disagree with some socialists who have thought they could triumph more
completely over the objection urged against them in the name of
Darwinism by declaring that in human society the "struggle for
existence" is a law which is destined to lose all meaning and
applicability when the social transformation at which socialism aims
shall have been effected.[13]

It is a law which dominates tyrannically all living beings, and it must
cease to act and fall inert at the feet of Man, as if he were not merely
a link inseparable from the great biological chain!

I maintained, and I still maintain, that the struggle for existence is a
law inseparable from life, and consequently from humanity itself, but
that, though remaining an inherent and constant law, it is gradually
transformed in its essence and attenuated in its forms.

Among primitive mankind the struggle for existence is but slightly
differentiated from that which obtains among the other animals. It is
the brutal struggle for daily food or for possession of the
females--hunger and love are, in fact, the two fundamental needs and the
two poles of life--and almost its only method is muscular violence. In a
more advanced phase there is joined to this basi