We can understand how Prof. Haeckel and his disciples, such as Prof. O. Schmidt, v. Hellwald and others, defend themselves energetically against the charge that Darwinism plays into the hands of Socialism; and that they, in turn, maintain the contrary to be true: that Darwinism is aristocratic in that it teaches that everywhere in Nature the more highly developed and stronger organism dominates the lower. Seeing that, according to these gentlemen, the property and cultured classes represent these more highly developed and stronger organisms in society, they look upon the domination of these as a matter of course, being justified by nature. This wing among our Darwinians has not the faintest notion of the economic laws that sway capitalist society, whose blind will raises, without selecting either the best, or the ablest, or the most thorough, often the most scampish and corrupt; places him on top; and thus puts him in a position to make the conditions of life and development most favorable for his descendants, without these having as much as to turn their hands. Striking an average, under no economic system is the prospect poorer than under capitalism for individuals animated with good and noble qualities, to rise and remain above; and it may be added without exaggeration that the prospect grows darker in the measure that this economic system approaches its apogee. Recklessness and unscrupulousness in the choice and application of the means, are weapons infinitely more effective and promiseful of success than all human virtues put together. To consider a social system, built upon such a basis, a system of the "fittest and best" is a feat that only he can be capable of whose knowledge of the essence and nature of such a society equals zero; or who, swayed by dyed-in-the-wool bourgeois prejudices, has lost all power to think on the subject and to draw his conclusions. The struggle for existence is found with all organisms. Without a knowledge of the circumstances that force them thereto, the struggle is carried on unconsciously. Such a struggle for existence is found among men also, within all social systems in which the sense of solidarity has vanished, or has not yet come to the surface. This struggle changes according to the forms that the social relations of man to man assume in the course of social evolution. In the course of this evolution it takes on the form of a class struggle that is carried on upon an ever higher plane. But these struggles lead--and in this human beings differ from all other creatures--to an ever clearer understanding of the situation, and finally to the recognition of the laws that govern and control their evolution. _Man has in the end but to apply this knowledge to his social and political development, and to adapt the latter accordingly._ The difference between man and the brute is that _man may be called a thinking animal, the brute, however, is no thinking man_. It is this