al Darwinism.

The struggle for existence necessarily causes the survival of the
individuals best fitted for the environment and the particular
historical period in which they live.

In the natural, biological domain, the free play of natural
(_cosmiques_) forces and conditions causes a progressive advance or
ascent of living forms, from the microbe up to Man.

In human society, on the contrary, that is to say, in the super-organic
evolution of Herbert Spencer, the intervention of other forces and the
occurrence of other conditions sometimes causes a retrograde selection
which always assures the survival of those who are best fitted for a
given environment at a given time, but the controlling principle of this
selection is in turn affected by the vicious conditions--if they are
vicious--of the environment.

Here we are dealing with the question of "social selection," or rather
"social selections," for there is more than one kind of social
selection. By starting from this idea--not clearly comprehended--some
writers, both socialists and non-socialists, have come to deny that the
Darwinian theories have any application to human society.

It is known, indeed, that in the contemporaneous civilized world natural
selection is injuriously interfered with by _military_ selection, by
_matrimonial_ selection, and, above all, by _economic_ selection.[21]

The temporary celibacy imposed upon soldiers certainly has a deplorable
effect upon the human race. It is the young men who on account of
comparatively poor physical constitutions are excused from military
service, who marry the first, while the healthier individuals are
condemned to a transitory sterility, and in the great cities run the
risk of contagion from syphilis which unfortunately has permanent
effects.

Marriage also, corrupted as it is in the existent society by economic
considerations, is ordinarily in practice a sort of retrogressive sexual
selection. Women who are true degenerates, but who have good dowries or
"prospects," readily find husbands on the marriage market, while the
most robust women of the people or of the middle class who have no
dowries are condemned to the sterility of compulsory old-maiddom or to
surrender themselves to a more or less gilded prostitution.[22]

It is indisputable that the present economic conditions exercise an
influence upon all the social relations of men. The monopoly of wealth
assures to its possessor the victory in the