Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
The most vigorous and influential social Darwinist in America was William Graham Sumner of Yale. Sumner not only made a striking adaptation of evolution to conservative thought, but also effectively propagated his philosophy through widely read books and articles, and converted his strategic teaching post in New Haven into a kind of social-Darwinian pulpit. He provided his age with a synthesis which, though not quite so grand as Spencer’s, was bolder in its stark and candid pessimism. Sumner’s synthesis brought together three great traditions of western capitalist culture: the Protestant ethic, the doctrines of classical economics, and Darwinian natural selection. Correspondingly, in the development of American thought Sumner played three roles: he was a great Puritan preacher, an exponent of the classical pessimism of Ricardo and Malthus, and an assimilator and popularizer of evolution.1 His sociology bridged the gap between the economic ethic set in motion by the Reformation and the thought of the nineteenth century, for it assumed that the industrious, temperate, and frugal man of the Protestant ideal was the equivalent of the “strong” or the “fittest” in the struggle for existence; and it supported the Ricardian principles of inevitability and laissez faire with a hard-bitten determinism that seemed to be at once Calvinistic and scientific.
Sumner was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on October 30, 1840. His father, Thomas Sumner, was a hard-working, self-educated English laborer who had come to America because his family’s industry was disrupted by the growth of the factory system. He brought up his children to respect the traditional Protestant economic virtues, and his frugality left a deep impress upon his son William, who came in time to acclaim the savings-bank depositor as “a hero of civilization.”2 The sociologist later wrote of his father:
His principles and habits of life were the best possible. His knowledge was wide and his judgment excellent. He belonged to the class of men of whom Caleb Garth in Middlemarch is the type. In early life I accepted, from books and other people, some views and opinions which differed from his. At the present time, in regard to these matters, I hold with him and not with the others.3
The economic doctrines of the classical tradition which were current in his early years strengthened Sumner’s paternal heritage. He came to think of pecuniary success as the inevitable product of diligence and thrift, and to see the lively capitalist society in which he lived as the fulfillment of the classical ideal of an automatically benevolent, free competitive order. At fourteen he had read Harriet Martineau’s popular little volumes, Illustrations of Political Economy, whose purpose was to acquaint the multitude with the merits of laissez faire through a series of parables illustrating Ricardian principles. There he became acquainted with the wage-fund doctrine, and its corollaries: “Nothing can permanently affect the rate of wages which does not affect the proportion of population to capital”; and “combinations of laborers against capitalists . . . cannot secure a permanent rise of wages unless the supply of labour falls short of the demand—in which case, strikes are usually unnecessary.” There also he found fictional proof that “a self-balancing power being . . . inherent in the entire system of commercial exchange, all apprehensions about the results of its unimpeded operations are absurd,” and that “a sin is committed when Capital is diverted from its normal course to be employed in producing at home that which is expensive and inferior, instead of preparing that which will purchase the same article cheaper and superior abroad.” Charities, whether public or private, Miss Martineau held, would never reduce the number of the indigent, but would only encourage improvidence and nourish “peculation, tyranny, and fraud.”4 Later Sumner declared that his conceptions of “capital, labor, money and trade were all formed by those books which I read in my boyhood.”5 Francis Wayland’s standard text in political economy, which he recited in college, seems to have impressed him but little, perhaps because it only confirmed well-fixed beliefs.
In 1859, when he matriculated at Yale, young Sumner devoted himself to theology. During undergraduate years Yale was still a pillar of orthodoxy, dominated by its versatile president, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, who had just turned from classical scholarship to write his Introduction to the Study of International Law, and by the Rev. Noah Porter, Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics, who as Woolsey’s successor would one day cross swords with Sumner over the proper place of the new science in education. Sumner, a somewhat frigid youth (who could seriously ask, “Is the reading of fiction justifiable?”) repelled many of his schoolmates; but his friends made up in munificence what they lacked in numbers. One of them, William C. Whitney, persuaded his elder brother Henry to supply funds for Sumner’s further education abroad; and the Whitneys secured a substitute to fill his place in the Union Army while Sumner pursued theological studies at Geneva, Göttingen, and Oxford.6 In 1868 Sumner was elected to a tutorship at Yale, beginning a lifelong association with its faculty that would be broken only by a few years spent as editor of a religious newspaper and rector of the Episcopal Church in Morristown, New Jersey. In 1872 he was elevated to the post of Professor of Political and Social Science in Yale College.
Despite personal coldness and a crisp, dogmatic classroom manner, Sumner had a wider following than any other teacher in Yale’s history.7 Upperclassmen found unique satisfaction in his courses; lowerclassmen looked forward to promotion chiefly as a means of becoming eligible to enroll in them.8 William Lyon Phelps, who took every one of Sumner’s courses as a matter of principle without regard for his interest in the subject matter, has left a memorable picture of Sumner’s dealings with a student dissenter:
“Professor, don’t you believe in any government aid to industries?”
“No! it’s root, hog, or die.”
“Yes, but hasn’t the hog got a right to root?”
“There are no rights. The world owes nobody a living.”
“You believe then, Professor, in only one system, the contract-competitive system?”
“That’s the only sound economic system. All others are fallacies.”
“Well, suppose some professor of political economy came along and took your job away from you. Wouldn’t you be sore?”
“Any other professor is welcome to try. If he gets my job, it is my fault. My business is to teach the subject so well that no one can take the job away from me.”9
The stamp of his early religious upbringing and interests marked all Sumner’s writings. Although clerical phraseology soon disappeared from his style, his temper remained that of a proselytizer, a moralist, an espouser of causes with little interest in distinguishing between error and iniquity in his opponents. “The type of mind which he exhibited,” writes his biographer, “was the Hebraic rather than the Greek. He was intuitive, rugged, emphatic, fervently and relentlessly ethical, denunciatory, prophetic.”10 He might insist that political economy was a descriptive science divorced from ethics,11 but his strictures on protectionists and socialists resounded with moral overtones. His popular articles read like sermons.
Sumner’s life was not entirely given to crusading. His intellectual activity passed through two overlapping phases, marked by a change less in his thought than in the direction of his work. During the 1870’s, 1880’s and early 1890’s, in the columns of popular journals and from the lecture platform, he waged a holy war against reformism, protectionism, socialism, and government interventionism. In this period he published What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883), “The Forgotten Man” (1883), and “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over” (1894). In the early 1890’s, however, Sumner turned his attention more and more to academic sociology. It was during this period that the manuscript of “Earth Hunger” was written and the monumental Science of Society projected. When Sumner, always a prodigious worker, found that his chapter on human customs had grown to 200,000 words, he decided to publish it as a separate volume. Thus, almost as an afterthought, Folkways was brought out in 1906.12 Although the deep ethical feelings of Sumner’s youth gave way to the sophisticated moral relativism of his social-science period, his underlying philosophy remained the same.
The major premises of his social philosophy Sumner derived from Herbert Spencer. For years after his graduate residence at Oxford, Sumner had had “vague notions floating in my head” about the possibility of creating a systematic science of society. In 1872, when The Study of Sociology was running serially in the Contemporary Review, Sumner seized upon Spencer’s ideas, and the evolutionary viewpoint in social science captivated his mind. It seemed that Spencer’s proposals showed the full potentialities of his own germinal ideas. The young man who had been impervious to Spencer’s Social Statics (because “I did not believe in natural rights or in his ‘fundamental principles’”) now found The Study of Sociology irresistible. “It solved the old difficulty about the relations of social science to history, rescued social science from the dominion of cranks, and offered a definite and magnificent field to work, from which we might hope at last to derive definite results for the solution of social problems.” After a few years, Professor O. C. Marsh’s researches in the evolution of the horse fully convinced Sumner of the development hypothesis. Plunging into Darwin, Haeckel, Huxley, and Spencer, he saturated himself with evolutionism.13
Like Darwin before him, Sumner went to Malthus for the first principles of his system. In many respects his sociology simply retraced the several steps in biological and social reasoning which ran from Malthus to Darwin and through Spencer to the modern social Darwinists. The foundation of human society, said Sumner, is the man-land ratio. Ultimately men draw their living from the soil, and the kind of existence they achieve, their mode of getting it, and their mutual relations in the process are all determined by the proportion of population to the available soil.14 Where men are few and soil is abundant, the struggle for existence is less savage, and democratic institutions are likely to prevail. When population presses upon the land supply, earth hunger arises, races of men move across the face of the world, militarism and imperialism flourish, conflict rages—and in government aristocracy dominates.
As men struggle to adjust themselves to the land, they enter into rivalry for leadership in the conquest of nature. In Sumner’s popular essays he stressed the idea that the hardships of life are incidents of the struggle against nature, that “we cannot blame our fellow-men for our share of these. My neighbor and I are both struggling to free ourselves from these ills. The fact that my neighbor has succeeded in this struggle better than I constitutes no grievance for me.”15 He continued:
Undoubtedly the man who possesses capital has a great advantage over the man who has no capital at all in the struggle for existence. . . . This does not mean that one man has an advantage against the other, but that, when they are rivals in the effort to get the means of subsistence from Nature, the one who has capital has immeasurable advantages over the other. If it were not so capital would not be formed. Capital is only formed by self-denial, and if the possession of it did not secure advantages and superiorities of a high order men would never submit to what is necessary to get it.16
Thus the struggle is like a whippet race; the fact that one hound chases the mechanical hare of pecuniary success does not prevent the others from doing the same.
Sumner was perhaps inspired to minimize the human conflicts in the struggle for existence by a desire to dull the resentment of the poor toward the rich. He did not at all times, however, shrink from a direct analogy between animal struggle and human competition.17 In the Spencerian intellectual atmosphere of the 1870’s and 1880’s it was natural for conservatives to see the economic contest in competitive society as a reflection of the struggle in the animal world. It was easy to argue by analogy from natural selection of fitter organisms to social selection of fitter men, from organic forms with superior adaptability to citizens with a greater store of economic virtues. The competitive order was now supplied with a cosmic rationale. Competition was glorious. Just as survival was the result of strength, success Was the reward of virtue. Sumner had no patience with those who would lavish compensations upon the virtueless. Many economists, he declared (in a lecture given in 1879 on the effect of hard times on economic thinking),
. . . seem to be terrified that distress and misery still remain on earth and promise to remain as long as the vices of human nature remain. Many of them are frightened at liberty, especially under the form of competition, which they elevate into a bugbear. They think it bears harshly on the weak. They do not perceive that here “the strong” and “the weak” are terms which admit of no definition unless they are made equivalent to the industrious and the idle, the frugal and the extravagant. They do not perceive, furthermore, that if we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of anti-civilization. We have our choice between the two, or we can go on, as in the past, vacillating between the two, but a third plan—the socialist desideratum—a plan for nourishing the unfittest and yet advancing in civilization, no man will ever find.18
The progress of civilization, according to Sumner, depends upon the selection process; and that in turn depends upon the workings of unrestricted competition. Competition is a law of nature which “can no more be done away with than gravitation,”19 and which men can ignore only to their sorrow.
The fundamentals of Sumner’s philosophy had been set forth in his magazine articles long before his sociological works were written. The first fact in life, he asserted, is the struggle for existence; the greatest forward step in this struggle is the production of capital, which increases the fruitfulness of labor and provides the necessary means of an advance in civilization. Primitive man, who long ago withdrew from the competitive struggle and ceased to accumulate capital goods, must pay with a backward and unenlightened way of life.20 Social advance depends primarily upon hereditary wealth; for wealth offers a premium to effort, and hereditary wealth assures the enterprising and industrious man that he may preserve in his children the virtues which have enabled him to enrich the community. Any assault upon hereditary wealth must begin with an attack upon the family and end by reducing men to “swine.”21 The operation of social selection depends upon keeping the family intact. Physical inheritance is a vital part of the Darwinian theory; the social equivalent of physical inheritance is the instruction of the children in the necessary economic virtues.22
If the fittest are to be allowed to survive, if the benefits of efficient management are to be available to society, the captains of industry must be paid for their unique organizing talent.23 Their huge fortunes are the legitimate wages of superintendence; in the struggle for existence, money is the token of success. It measures the amount of efficient management that has come into the world and the waste that has been eliminated.24 Millionaires are the bloom of a competitive civilization:
The millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done. . . . It is because they are thus selected that wealth—both their own and that entrusted to them—aggregates under their hands. . . . They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society. There is the intensest competition for their place and occupation. This assures us that all who are competent for this function will be employed in it, so that the cost of it will be reduced to the lowest terms.25
In the Darwinian pattern of evolution, animals are unequal; this makes possible the appearance of forms with finer adjustment to the environment, and the transmission of such superiority to succeeding generations brings about progress. Without inequality the law of survival of the fittest could have no meaning. Accordingly, in Sumner’s evolutionary sociology, inequality of powers was at a premium.26 The competitive process “develops all powers that exist according to their measure and degree.” If liberty prevails, so that all may exert themselves freely in the struggle, the results will certainly not be everywhere alike; those of “courage, enterprise, good training, intelligence, perseverance” will come out at the top.27
Sumner concluded that these principles of social evolution negated the traditional American ideology of equality and natural rights. In the evolutionary perspective, equality was ridiculous; and no one knew so well as those who went to school to nature that there are no natural rights in the jungle. “There can be no rights against Nature except to get out of her whatever we can, which is only the fact of the struggle for existence stated over again.”28 In the cold light of evolutionary realism, the eighteenth-century idea that men were equal in a state of nature was the opposite of the truth; masses of men starting under conditions of equality could never be anything but hopeless savages.29 To Sumner rights were simply evolving folkways crystallized in laws. Far from being absolute or antecedent to a specific culture—an illusion of philosophers, reformers, agitators, and anarchists—they are properly understood as “rules of the game of social competition which are current now and here.”30 In other times and places other mores have prevailed, and still others will emerge in the future:
Each set of views colors the mores of a period. The eighteenth-century notions about equality, natural rights, classes and the like produced nineteenth-century states and legislation, all strongly humanitarian in faith and temper; at the present time the eighteenth-century notions are disappearing, and the mores of the twentieth century will not be tinged by humanitarianism as those of the last hundred years have been.31
Sumner’s resistance to the catchwords of the American tradition is also evident in his skepticism about democracy. The democratic ideal, so alive in the minds of men as diverse as Eugene Debs and Andrew Carnegie, as a thing of great hopes, warm sentiments, and vast friendly illusions, was to him simply a transient stage in social evolution, determined by a favorable quotient in the man-land ratio and the political necessities of the capitalist class.32 “Democracy itself, the pet superstition of the age, is only a phase of the all-compelling movement. If you have abundance of land and few men to share it, the men will all be equal.”33 Conceived as a principle of advancement based on merit, democracy met his approval as “socially progressive and profitable.” Conceived as equality in acquisition and enjoyment, he thought it unintelligible in theory, and thoroughly impracticable.34 “Industry may be republican; it can never be democratic so long as men differ in productive power and in industrial virtue.”35
In a brilliant essay which he never published, but which was written some time before the studies of J. Allen Smith and Charles A. Beard, Sumner divined the intentions of the founding fathers in the making of the American Constitution. They feared democracy, Sumner pointed out, and attempted to set limits upon it in the federal structure; but since the whole genius of the country has inevitably been democratic, because of its inherited dogmas and its environment, the history of the United States has been one of continual warfare between the democratic temper of the people and their constitutional framework.36
One concept of the evolutionary philosophy which Sumner borrowed from Spencer and employed with great effect in his fight against reformers was social determinism. Society, the product of centuries of gradual evolution, cannot be quickly refashioned by legislation:
The great stream of time and earthly things will sweep on just the same in spite of us. . . . Every one of us is a child of his age and cannot get out of it. He is in the stream and is swept along with it. All his science and philosophy come to him out of it. Therefore the tide will not be changed by us. It will swallow up both us and our experiments. . . . That is why it is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.37
To Sumner as to Spencer, society was a superorganism, changing at geological tempo. For its emphasis upon slow change, Sumner eagerly welcomed The Study of Sociology. In his view, the social meddlers had been laboring under the delusion that, since there are no natural laws of the social order, they might make the world over with artificial ones;38 but he expected that Spencer’s new science would dissolve these fantasies.
With the evolutionist’s characteristic scorn for all forms of meliorism and voluntarism, Sumner dismissed Upton Sinclair and his fellow socialists as puny meddlers, social quacks, who would try to break into the age-old process of societal growth at an arbitrary point and remake it in accordance with their petty desires. They started from the premise that “everybody ought to be happy” and assumed that therefore it should be possible to make everyone happy. They never asked, “In what direction is society moving?” or, “What are the mechanisms which motivate its progress?” Evolution would teach them that it is impossible to tear down overnight a social system whose roots are centuries deep in the soil of history. History would teach them that revolutions never succeed—witness the experience of France, where the Napoleonic period left essential interests much as they had been before 1789.39
Every system has its inevitable evils. “Poverty belongs to the struggle for existence, and we are all born into that struggle.”40 If poverty is ever to be abolished, it will be by a more energetic prosecution of the struggle, and not by social upheaval or paper plans for a new order. Human progress is at bottom moral progress, and moral progress is largely the accumulation of economic virtues. “Let every man be sober, industrious, prudent, and wise, and bring up his children to be so likewise, and poverty will be abolished in a few generations.”41
Thus the evolutionary philosophy provided a powerful argument against legislative meddling with natural events. Sumner’s conception of the proper limits of state action, although not quite so drastic as Spencer’s, was severe. “At bottom there are two chief things with which government has to deal. They are the property of men and the honor of women. These it has to defend against crime.”42 Outside the field of education, where Sumner’s influence was always progressive, there were few reforms proposed in America during his active years which he did not attack. In a series of essays written for the Independent in 1887, Sumner assailed several current reform projects as fabrications of rampant pressure groups. The Bland Silver Bill he considered an irrational compromise set up by a few public men without substantial promise of giving any real aid to debtors, silver miners, or any other part of the population. State laws limiting convict labor he damned as hasty and pointless legislation in response to partisan clamor. The Interstate Commerce Act lacked philosophy or design. The railroad question “is far wider than the scope of any proposed legislation; the railroads are interwoven with so many complex interests that legislators cannot meddle with them without doing harm to all concerned.”43 The free-silver movement he attacked with the arguments of orthodox economics.44 “All poor laws and all eleemosynary institutions and expenditures” he scored as devices that protect persons at the expense of capital and ultimately lower the general standard of living by making it easier for the poor to live, thus increasing the number of consumers of capital while lowering incentives to its production.45 With trade unions he was more indulgent, conceding that a strike, if conducted without violence, might be a means of testing the market conditions for labor. All the justification a strike required was success; failure was enough to condemn it. Trade unions might also be useful in maintaining the esprit de corps of the working class, and of keeping it informed. The conditions of labor—sanitation, ventilation, the hours of women and children—might better be controlled by the spontaneous activity of organized labor than by state enforcement.46
Aside from anti-imperialism, the one great dissenting impulse of his age that attracted Sumner was free trade. But, in his mind, free trade was not a reform movement; it was an intellectual axiom. Although in 1885 he wrote a short tract elaborating the classical arguments against protection (Protectionism, The Ism That Teaches That Waste Makes Wealth), he felt that protectionism was hardly open to dispute by enlightened men—“that it ought to be treated as other quackeries are treated.”47 Believing that tariffs, as well as other forms of government intervention in economic life, might culminate in socialism, he identified protectionism and socialism on principle, defining socialism as “any device whose aim is to save individuals from any of the difficulties or hardships of the struggle for existence and the competition of life by the intervention of ‘the state.’”48 The tariff, he admitted, never ceased to arouse his highest moral indignation. He once wrote angry protests to the newspapers because women employed in sweatshops stitching corsets for fifty cents a day had to pay a tariff on their thread.49
Intransigent against what he considered abuses of the right or left, Sumner drew fire from both sides. Upton Sinclair, in The Goose-Step, called him, long after his death, “a prime minister in the empire of plutocratic education”;50 and another socialist accused him of intellectual prostitution.51 Such critics showed little comprehension of Sumner’s character or the governing motives of his mind. He was doctrinaire because his ideas were bred in his bones. He was not a business hireling, nor did he feel himself to be the spokesman of plutocracy, but rather of the middle classes. He attacked economic democracy, but he had no sympathy for plutocracy, as he understood it; he thought it responsible for political corruption and protectionist lobbies.52 Significantly, he had praise for the Jeffersonian democracy in so far as it practised abnegation of state power and decentralization in government.53 Sumner’s unforgettable “Forgotten Man,” the hero of most of his popular essays, was simply the middle-class citizen, who, like Sumner’s father, went quietly about his business, providing for himself and his family without making demands upon the state.54 The crushing effect of taxation upon such people gave Sumner his most anxious moments and explains in part his opposition to state interventionism.55 It was his misfortune that this class had moved on to the support of reform while he was still trying to fight its cause with the intellectual weapons of Harriet Martineau and David Ricardo.
On the rare occasions when Sumner’s thought ran counter to the established verities, he would stand his ground under the greatest pressure. His famous fight with President Porter over the use of The Study of Sociology as a textbook might have cost him his position at Yale, and he was quite ready to resign. Constantly under criticism from the press for his outspoken stand on the tariff, he never faltered. The New York Tribune, in the course of a denunciation of his articles on protection, once likened his manners to those of “the cheap Tombs shyster.”56 The Republican press and Republican alumni of Yale periodically urged his dismissal; the demand became general when he announced his opposition to the Spanish-American War.57 Although one old-fashioned benefactor of Yale doubled his donation because Sumner’s presence had convinced him “that Yale College is a good and safe place for the keeping and use of property and the sustaining of civilization when endangered by ignorance, rascality, demagogues, repudiationists, rebels, copperheads, communists, Butlers, strikers, protectionists, and fanatics of sundry roots and sizes,”58 Sumner was always suspect to a large part of the community of wealth and orthodoxy because of his independence.
Sumner’s reputation has come to rest upon his Folkways, and in lesser measure upon his historical writings, while his many social-Darwinist essays have fallen into comparative obscurity.59 Natural selection in the realm of ideas has taken its toll upon his life work. The ideas for which Folkways is most esteemed were never reconciled with the rest of his thought. The great contribution of that work was its conception of folkways as products of “natural forces,” as evolutionary growths, rather than artifacts of human purpose or wit.60 Critics have often suggested that Sumner’s denial of the intuitive character of morals, his insistence upon their historical and institutional foundations, undermined his own stand against socialists and protectionists.61 A thoroughly consistent evolutionist, prepared to carry out the amoral and narrowly empirical approach to social change laid down in Folkways, would not have been so disturbed as Sumner was by the decline of laissez faire, but might have accepted it in a mellow and complaisant spirit as a new trend in the development of the mores. On the subject of laissez faire and property rights, however, Sumner was uncompromising and absolute. There is no complaisance in Protectionism, the Ism That Teaches That Waste Makes Wealth, no mellowness in “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over.” As a recruit from the theological life who had always been absorbed in his own Yankee culture, Sumner found the effort of a completely consistent relativism too great. It was easier for an unacclimated alien like Thorstein Veblen to treat American society with the loftiness of a cultural anthropologist. For Sumner, the marriage customs of the Wawanga and the property relations of the Dyaks were always in a separate universe of discourse from like institutions of his own culture.
As a defender of the status quo, Sumner was an effective figure in American life. Since the Revolution the dogmas of the Enlightenment had been traditional ingredients of the American faith. American social thought had been optimistic, confident of the special destiny of the country, humanitarian, democratic. Its reformers still relied upon the sanctions of natural rights. It was Sumner’s function to take the leadership in a critical examination of these ideological fixtures, using as his instrument the early nineteenth-century pessimism of Ricardo and Malthus, now fortified with the tremendous prestige of Darwinism. He set himself the task of deflating the philosophical speculation of the eighteenth century with the science of the nineteenth. He tried to show his contemporaries that their optimism was a hollow defiance of the realities of social struggle, that their “natural rights” were nowhere to be found in nature, that their humanitarianism, democracy, and equality were not eternal verities, but the passing mores of a stage of social evolution. In an age of helter-skelter reforms, he tried to convince men that confidence in their ability to will and plan their destinies was unwarranted by history or biology or any of the facts of experience—that the best they could do was to bow to natural forces. Like some latter-day Calvin, he came to preach the predestination of the social order and the salvation of the economically elect through the survival of the fittest.