Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/282

268 But there should not be any competition at all, the socialist will reply; competition is itself immoral. Again, let us get close to the facts. Competition, if we consider it as a word, is an abstract noun—so the grammarians used to tell us—and abstract nouns can not be accused of immorality. If we consider it as a thing, then it is a form of human action, and we must throw the immorality back on the men who practice it. Now, in what individual action does the immorality begin? Let us, if possible, get at the fons et origo mali. A certain household requires a domestic servant. Is it wrong to decide between the applicants according to their merits? Is it wrong to reject an inefficient person in favor of an efficient? A man wants a tutor for his boys. Is it wrong to insist on proofs of scholarship and character? A merchant wants a bookkeeper. May he be allowed to prefer one who comes to him with good recommendations to one who has none, and whose appearance and manner are not in his favor? If such things as these are permissible, we have the outlines of competition clearly traced; yet is there anything immoral in assigning a task, with its accompanying reward, to the person best qualified to perform it? But the world, it will perhaps be contended, should not be arranged in such a way as to allow two persons to want the same thing. Possibly, if some of our socialist friends could "grasp this sorry scheme of things entire" they might do some notable "remolding"; but whether they would really advance human happiness is quite an open question. Zola somewhere says that if they had their way they would make the very dogs howl with despair; but, however that may be, it is evidently difficult to fix the responsibility for competition on any power less general than that which made the world.

The golden rule (to get back to it) bids us do to others as we would be done by. The rule is laid down for all alike, and, strictly speaking, no one is entitled to claim the benefit of it who is disregarding it in his own practice. The man who shuns honest industry is not doing as he would be done by; he wishes others to work that he may eat. Yet, if we mistake not, the golden rule is often invoked on behalf of those who are systematic viola tors of it, whose whole lives are an injury to society. No moral rule could ever have been intended to place us at the mercy of one another's desires, and in the case of this particular precept we are required to seek within ourselves, and not simply in the desires of others, the law we are to follow. It is what we would that men should do to us that we are to do to them. The responsibility is thus thrown upon us of determining the demands which, in given circumstances, we would make—i. e., ought to make—of other men. Which of us, then, would say, "We demand that, whenever we want a thing, we shall get it, no matter what claims others may have, or think they have, to the same thing"; or, We demand that whatever we ask for we shall get, independently of merit or qualification on our part"? If such demands need only to be formulated in order to be seen to be absurd, the conclusion comes home to us again with force that the only demand we can really make is one for fair play and justice.

There is nothing wrong with competition as such, for it is merely a necessary form of sifting with a view to obtaining a proper adjustment of each man to his place in life. That it works perfectly to that end, no one would care to pretend; but it has that end in view,