continuation and
complement of natural (biological) Darwinism, will result in a selection
of the best.

To respond fully to this insistence upon an unlimited aristocratic
selection, I must call attention to another natural law which serves to
complete that rhythm of action and reaction which results in the
equilibrium of life.

To the Darwinian law of natural inequalities we must add another law
which is inseparable from it, and which Jacoby, following in the track
of the labors of Morel, Lucas, Galton, De Caudole, Ribot, Spencer,
Royer, Lombroso, and others, has clearly demonstrated and expounded.

This same Nature, which makes "choice" and aristocratic gradation a
condition of vital progress, afterwards restores the equilibrium by a
leveling and democratic law.

"From the infinite throng of humanity there emerge individuals, families
and races which tend to rise above the common level; painfully climbing
the steep heights they reach the summits of power, wealth, intelligence
and talent, and, having reached the goal, they are hurled down and
disappear in the abysses of insanity and degeneration. Death is the
great leveler; by destroying every one who rises above the common herd,
it democratizes humanity."[25]

Every one who attempts to create a monopoly of natural forces comes into
violent conflict with that supreme law of Nature which has given to all
living beings the use and disposal of the natural agents: air and light,
water and land.

Everybody who is too much above or too much below the average of
humanity--an average which rises with the flux of time, but is
absolutely fixed at any given moment of history--does not live and
disappears from the stage.

The idiot and the man of genius, the starving wretch and the
millionaire, the dwarf and the giant, are so many natural or social
monsters, and Nature inexorably blasts them with degeneracy or
sterility, no matter whether they be the product of the organic life, or
the effect of the social organization.

And so, all families possessing a monopoly of any kind--monopoly of
power, of wealth or of talent--are inevitably destined to become in
their latest offshoots imbeciles, sterile or suicides, and finally to
become extinct. Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, descendants of
millionaires--all follow the common law which, here again, serves to
confirm the inductions--in this sense, equalitarian--of science and of
socialism.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] One of th