C. plus A.D. The treatises of the Ricardian
economists on the Law of Diminishing Return, which was only the
Manchester School's version of the giraffe and the trees, were all very
fiercely discussed when Darwin was a young man. In fact the discovery in
the eighteenth century by the French Physiocrats of the economic
effects of Commercial Selection in soils and sites, and by Malthus of
a competition for subsistence which he attributed to pressure of
population on available subsistence, had already brought political
science into that unbreathable atmosphere of fatalism which is the
characteristic blight of Darwinism. Long before Darwin published a line,
the Ricardo-Malthusian economists were preaching the fatalistic Wages
Fund doctrine, and assuring the workers that Trade Unionism is a vain
defiance of the inexorable laws of political economy, just as the
Neo-Darwinians were presently assuring us that Temperance Legislation is
a vain defiance of Natural Selection, and that the true way to deal with
drunkenness is to flood the country with cheap gin and let the fittest
survive.
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