SOME SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF

INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION

CHAPTER I

COMPETITION: ITS NATURE, ITS PERMANENCY, AND ITS BENEFICENCE

A STRANGE contrast is afforded by the various utterances of popular economic literature touching the subject of competition. The following quotation furnishes us with a forceful expression of opinion adverse to competition, and may be taken as typical of views held by a class of sincere, enthusiastic champions of social reform:

Competition is not law, but lawlessness. Carried to its logical outcome it is anarchy or the absence of law. Man is a moral, spiritual, and social being, not dominated by animal law. There can be no such thing as a harmonized society with any competitive elements in it, and Christianity is impossible. Every man owes the world his life, and must live to have a life to give. In competitive conditions, not character, but cunning, survives. The gospel of success is the great insanity of modern materialism, absorbing the best brain, thought, and life of the race; we have been feeding

our children to this great Moloch of success, but as a result we have been warping the intellect and making moral idiots.

"We are coming to a higher evolution, in which the law of mutual service shall be the law of life. Any attempt to build society on a competitive foundation is fundamentally anarchical. The idea

of brotherhood has come to stay, and will not back down at the bidding of politicians, monopolists, or theologians. The years behind us are but a getting together of human material in a divine effort of perfected humanity. Democracy must be applied to reorganizing the machinery of the world." 1

Now let us put over against this utterance a clear-cut expression of opinion as favorable to competition as the words we have just used are unfavorable to this manifestation of social force in our economic life:

"Competition was the gigantic motor that caused nearly everybody during the first nineteen centuries of Christian civilization to use all his mental and physical powers to get ahead. The best efforts of humanity, stimulated by competition have lifted our race to a standard where the mode of living of common laborers is more comfortable and desirable than the everyday existence of the kings of whom Homer sings."2

1 Cleveland Citizen, March 14, 1896. Attributed to George D. Herron.

85.

2 Richard Michaelis in "Looking Further Forward," pp. v and

Once again listen to this vigorous outburst in denunciation of competition, written some fifty years ago by a distinguished leader of Christian socialism in England: "Sweet competition! Heavenly maid! . . Nowadays hymned alike by penny-a-liners and philosophers as the ground of all society, . . the only real preserver of the earth! Why not of Heaven, too? Perhaps there is competition among the angels, and Gabriel and Raphael have won their rank by doing the maximum of worship on the minimum of grace. We shall know some day. In the meanwhile, 'these are thy works, thou parent of all good!' Man eating man, man eaten by man, in every variety of degree and method! Why does not some enthusiastic political economist write an epic on 'The Consecration of Cannibalism'?"1

On the other hand, listen to these words by a sturdy American, whose courage in denunciation of wrong in high places no one can rightly impugn:

"The competition of economics is not the socalled competition of our great centres, where men strive to drive men to the wall, but the competition which leaves each in full possession of that productive power which best unites his labor with the labor of others. Competition is no more trespass than it is theft. It is the reconciliation of men in those productive processes which issue in the larg

1 Charles Kingsley, in "Cheap Clothes and Nasty," printed with Alton Locke, Vol. I, pp. 82-83.

est aggregate of wealth. It is not crowding men off their feet, but a means of planting them upon their feet."1

These quotations could be multiplied indefinitely on the one side and on the other. We find it asserted on the one hand that competition is sinful warfare; that it is "division, disunion, every man for himself, every man against his brother";2 on the other hand that it is mutual service; that it is altruism of a superior quality; that it is the essence of the golden rule; that it is loving our neighbor as ourselves in other words, that a correct rendering of Christian love is competition.3

Apparently such contradictory views admit of no reconciliation. But when we think seriously about the matter, we are forced to ask ourselves the question: How is it possible that men of undoubted capacity, of unquestioned sincerity, of warm enthusiasm for humanity, can hold views respecting competition, this great corner-stone of our economic order, so diametrically opposed that what the one cordially hates the other ardently admires as a source of abundance for all the deserving children of men? May it not be that, after all, these disputants are talking about somewhat different things, and that what is needed, first of all, is definition?

1 John Bascom, on the "Moral Discipline of Business," The Kingdom, Minneapolis, May, 1896.

3 Edward Atkinson, on “Coöperative World, September, 1895.

2

Kingsley, loc. cit., p. 104.

Competition," The New

What, precisely, do we have in mind when we discuss competition? Competition, in a large sense, means a struggle of conflicting interests. If we open our dictionaries and read the definitions there given, we shall find something like this in each one of them, "The act of seeking or endeavoring to gain what another is endeavoring to gain at the same time; common contest, or striving for the same object; strife for superiority; rivalry" ("Century Dictionary").

Professor Gide uses these words to tell us what he understands by competition in this large sense, "When each individual in a country is at liberty to take the action he considers the most advantageous for himself, whether as regards the choice of an employment or the disposal of his goods, we are living under the régime of competition." 1

But we do not have enough precision in these definitions to answer our purposes. Economic competition, it is true, is a struggle of conflicting interests for valuable things, for what we call, in its widest sense, wealth. But is all struggle for wealth competition? If I knock you down with a sand-bag and rob you, is that to be called competition? If I fit out an armed ship and prey upon the commerce of the world, is that competition? If I cheat you by a lie, are the lie and the fraud part of the competitive process? The reply comes

1 " Principles of Political Economy," by Charles Gide, translated by E. P. Jacobsen, 1892, p. 64.