The statement that natural selection “favors aristocratic aspirations,” involves the same fallacy. It assumes that aristocrats are on top because of fitness to be there. Recent revelations in Berlin indicate that the aristocrats of Haeckel’s own country are “fittest” for the garbage can. Haeckel’s main position is that “the struggle for existence” in nature is a justification for “competition” in society. To begin with, Kropotkin has shown that Haeckel grossly misrepresents nature when he speaks of “the cruel, pitiless ‘struggle for existence’ which rages everywhere throughout animated nature” and “between all living beings.” When this is used as a defense of present society, it is equal to saying that human society should seek its models among the lowest forms of organic life rather than the highest. Haeckel’s position was taken by Spencer and received the following clever reply from Prof. Ritchie: “The struggle among plants and the lower animals is mainly between members of the same species; and the individual competition between human beings, which is so much admired by Mr. Spencer, is of this primitive kind.” Kropotkin says: “If we ask nature ‘who are the fittest, those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.” As to the desirability of that “pitiless struggle,” Huxley pertinently says: “Of all the shapes which society has taken, that most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of the individual against the individual is most strictly limited.” Whatever may be the truth among the protozoa, we are safe in applying to society the statement of Ruskin: “Co-operation is always and everywhere the law of life; competition is always and everywhere the law of death.” Human society eventually reaches a point of development where nature’s haphazard ways are interfered with, and man arranges means to an end. Professor Schiaparelli thought he saw canals on Mars, and inferred intelligent inhabitants. The difference in water-ways, between blind nature and a designing intelligence, is the difference between a rambling river and a straight canal. Now human society has arrived at a stage where its consciousness of itself and the possibility of self-arrangement, becomes a factor. This is a tremendous step forward, and its future possibilities seem to be illimitable. Before this can be largely effective, however, it will be necessary to thoroughly understand all fundamental social laws.