They are in the midst of social powers which mock their puny efforts to administer. Contradictions arise which cannot continue. As soon as a capitalist country is over-stocked with wealth, poverty prepares to stalk abroad. But amid all this confusion, something moves on, a something which we sometimes call the spirit of the age. Society grows restless and instinctively anticipates a coming change. A new class rises into prominence and begins to realize its strength and develop its intelligence. The ruling class still proclaims its will, but cannot always execute it. Colorado, Idaho, and Haywood are proof of that. The mental development of this new class has reached the point where it has become an intellectual factor in the national life. Its voice is listened to by publishers of books. It establishes its own press. It publishes a literature of its own. It creates its own platform. It reaches into the future and demands control of its own destiny. And now see how all this is reflected in the scientific world. It is no longer true that species require thousands of years for the simplest change. We are now informed that change takes place by sudden leaps. At one single step a new species appears and begins its existence. There is therefore, no longer anything in biological science to contradict the Socialist position that a new society may be born of a sudden revolution. Mutation, the savants tell us, runs in periods, alternating with periods of apparent stability. Then if we are not supported we are at any rate not contradicted, when we assert that in social development, periods of economic evolution, with apparent social stability, are followed by periods of social revolution when the entire social superstructure is transformed. It is no longer necessary to assume countless millions of years for the evolution of living forms. A plant enjoys a period of apparent stability, then it reaches a point where it “explodes” and gives birth to new species. If a plant, why not a society? At least there is nothing in the example of the plant that will furnish an argument against such an idea. If the history of biological science for the last half a century were to be written by a Socialist, who had no scruples about wresting the record so as to support his Socialist theories, he would have nothing to gain by changing a single line. There is nothing in that history to contradict us when we assert the probability or the certainty, of a social revolution. Who, that looks about him, can fail to see that death is plainly branded in the brow of the existing social order? Its legal, political, and financial institutions are tied together with rotten thread. It is already outliving its usefulness, and when it goes it will have few mourners. But millions will hail with joy that social mutation which will kindle the fires of human liberty, and create, if not a new Heaven, at least, a new earth. VI. KROPOTKIN’S “MUTUAL AID.”