The answer to the question proposed, “Are the present classes also the groups where men can be ranked according to their qualities”, must be decidedly negative. The bourgeoisie is not the ruling class because the most intelligent and energetic persons are found among its members. There are also included in this class persons without energy, stupid people, of minor importance in short, just as in the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat very capable persons may be met with. The fact of being excluded from the class of possessors is not a proof of inferiority. If the superior persons were those who led society they would be the great thinkers, the savants, for it is they who have made society progress and who have desired its well-being. For even if capitalists, more than others, have aided progress, it is by chance, for they have always had in view only their own profit. [284] I could easily cite a number of celebrated authors who are unanimously of the opinion that the conquerors in the present struggle are not such because they are naturally superior. [285] I will confine myself to recalling the opinion of one whose authority no one will contest, namely, Charles Darwin. Here is what Wallace says: “In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself as having very little hope of the future of humanity, and this upon the basis of his observation that in our modern civilization natural selection does not occur, and the fittest does not survive. The victors in the struggle for gold are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is a well known fact that our population reproduces itself in each generation much more rapidly among the lower than among the middle and upper classes.” [286] An examination of the struggle for existence in the middle class shows that everything which happens in the bourgeoisie on a large scale is reproduced here on a small scale. He who has little capital is surpassed by a competitor who has more, even though the former may be entirely fitted for his business; crises have the same ruinous influence here, and strike skilful and unskilful alike. The difference, as far as the struggle for existence is concerned, between the class in question and the bourgeoisie, consists in this: the less energetic, the less intelligent of the middle class runs more danger of falling back out of the ranks than a member of the bourgeoisie who is his equal.