effects of Commercial Selection in soils and sites, and by Malthus of
a competition for subsistence which he attributed to pressure of
population on available subsistence, had already brought political
science into that unbreathable atmosphere of fatalism which is the
characteristic blight of Darwinism. Long before Darwin published a line,
the Ricardo-Malthusian economists were preaching the fatalistic Wages
Fund doctrine, and assuring the workers that Trade Unionism is a vain
defiance of the inexorable laws of political economy, just as the
Neo-Darwinians were presently assuring us that Temperance Legislation is
a vain defiance of Natural Selection, and that the true way to deal with
drunkenness is to flood the country with cheap gin and let the fittest
survive. Cobdenism is, after all, nothing but the abandonment of trade
to Circumstantial Selection.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of this preparation
for Darwinism by a vast political and clerical propaganda of its moral
atmosphere. Never in history, as far as we know, had there been such a
determined, richly subsidized, politically organized attempt to persuade
the human race that all progress, all prosperity, all salvation,
individual and social, depend on an unrestrained conflict for food and
money, on the suppression and elimination of the weak by the strong,
on Free Trade, Free Contract, Free Competition, Natural Liberty,
Laisser-faire: in short, on 'doing the other fellow down' with impunity,
all interference by a guiding government, all organization except police
organization to protect legalized fraud against fisticuffs, all
attempt to introduce human purpose and design and forethought into the
industrial welter, being 'contrary to the laws of political economy.'
Even the proletariat sympathized, though to them Capitalist liberty
meant only wage slavery without the legal safeguards of chattel slavery.
People were tired of governments and kings and priests and providences,