DARWIN AND KARL MARX

Besides, the Socialists had an evolutionary prophet of their own, who
had discredited Manchester as Darwin discredited the Garden of Eden.
Karl Marx had proclaimed in his Communist Manifesto of 1848 (now
enjoying Scriptural authority in Russia) that civilization is an
organism evolving irresistibly by circumstantial selection; and he
published the first volume of his Das Kapital in 1867. The revolt
against anthropomorphic idolatry, which was, as we have seen, the secret
of Darwin's success, had been accompanied by a revolt against the
conventional respectability which covered not only the brigandage and
piracy of the feudal barons, but the hypocrisy, inhumanity, snobbery,
and greed of the bourgeoisie, who were utterly corrupted by an
essentially diabolical identification of success in life with big
profits. The moment Marx shewed that the relation of the bourgeoisie to
society was grossly immoral and disastrous, and that the whited wall of
starched shirt fronts concealed and defended the most infamous of all
tyrannies and the basest of all robberies, he became an inspired prophet
in the mind of every generous soul whom his book reached. He had said
and proved what they wanted to have proved; and they would hear nothing
against him. Now Marx was by no means infallible: his economics, half
borrowed, and half home-made by a literary amateur, were not, when
strictly followed up, even favorable to Socialism. His theory of
civilisation had been promulgated already in Buckle's History of
Civilization, a book as epoch-making in the minds of its readers as Das
Kapital. There was nothing about Socialism in the widely read first
volume of Das Kapital: every reference it made to workers and
capitalists shewed that Marx had never breathed industrial air, and had
dug his case out of bluebooks in the British Museum. Compared to Darwin,
he seemed to have no power of observation: there was not a fact in Das