Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/176

 1 62 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

conceives socialistic schemes fundamentally defective, and recom- mends in their stead all forms of social or political action which will in any way remove present hindrances upon competition. He is optimistic enough to believe that the present trend, of western civilization at least, is in this direction. In his closing pages he says :

The central fact working itself out in our midst is one which is ever tend- ing to bring about, for the first time in the history of the race, all the people into competition of life on a footing of equality of opportunity. In this process the problem with which society and legislators will be concerned for long into the future will be how to secure to the fullest degree those condi- tions of equality, while at the same time retaining that degree of inequality which must result from offering prizes sufficiently attractive to keep up within the community that stress and exertion without which no people can long continue in a high state of efficiency.

There is much truth and value in what Kidd has shown us ; and to the doctrine contained in the quotation which we have just made there can scarcely be given anything but praise. For, as we have seen, the result of our own inquiries has been to show, not only the necessity for, but the actual persistence of, competi- tion among men even in the highest social states. The pity is, then, that in the body of his work Kidd, like his teacher Spencer, should nowhere have properly characterized or appar- ently comprehended what should be the true character of this competition, but should have interpreted it as practically equiva- lent to that mere struggle for life and subsistence which char- acterizes the sub-human sphere. It is furthermore unfortunate that he should have largely covered over what value otherwise

led to declare that progress will be the most swift where the number of men born into the world is greatest in excess of the means of possible subsistence, for under such circumstances the competition will be the keenest, the weeding out of the inefficient most rapid, and the selection of the fit most exact. It is a perfectly obvious fact, however, that history shows this not to have been the result among men. This incon- gruity of fact and theory should alone have been sufficient to warn Kidd that his prem- ises needed revising. In this connection, also, we might call attention to the fact, excellently brought out by MALLOCK in his Aristocracy and Evolution, that very much of the competition that has existed among men has been between employers rather than the employed, and has thus been a struggle not so much for subsistence as for dominion and other satisfactions. Upon this point see also a review of Kidd's work by THEODORE ROOSEVELT in the North American Review for July, 1895.