Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/283

Rh and accomplishes it to a measurable extent. Without competition in some form there would be no adaptation, and society would relapse into a state of chaos. If there is adaptation to-day throughout the whole range of the organic world, it is because competition has been at work from the very beginning of things. It is not necessary to deny that competition has been and is attended by many evils; but it will be found on examination that these evils are generally of a character to impair the competition and render it more or less illusory. The trouble in these cases is not with the principle of competition, but with the frauds of one kind or another by which it has been vitiated—acts that are in direct violation of the golden rule, because they are such as no man would wish to have perpetrated on himself. As applied to competition, the golden rule demands an honorable observance of the conditions, expressed and implied, of every competition: it requires that every competitor shall do by every other as he would himself be done by.

Apart, however, from fraudulent competition it may be admitted that in some cases parties compete who might well refrain from doing so. There is a passage in Mr. Spencer's Principles of Morality (vol. ii, page 282) which bears directly on this point. "In its application," he says, "to cases of this kind the popular maxim, 'Live and let live,' may be accepted as embodying a truth. Any one who, by command of great capital or superior business capacity, is enabled to beat others who carry on the same business, is enjoined by the principle of negative beneficence to restrain his business activities when his own wants and those of his belongings have been abundantly filled, so that others, occupied as he is, may fulfill their wants also, though in smaller measure." There is something, however, to be said on behalf of those who do not "restrain their business activities" at the point mentioned by Mr. Spencer. In the first place, the capitalist need not waste his money on senseless luxury and ostentation, but may employ it in judicious enterprises for the general good. In the second place, by staying in business he gives the public the benefit of his superior methods, instead of leaving the field to those who, on the whole, would not, it may be assumed, carry on business so satisfactorily—possibly not deal as generously or humanely with the persons whom they employ as he is able to do with those whom he employs. Evidently, it is very difficult to draw a line at the exact point where a given individual should withdraw from competition. The question for the individual concerned is how he can best discharge his obligations to society—how he can do most good to society—and it seems to us that, in some cases at least, this requirement would most fully be met by his continuing to direct the business which he has organized on a sound basis, and is carrying on to the satisfaction and benefit of a large portion of the public. The golden rule—the spirit of it, at least—is not violated so long as, to the best of a man's judgment, what he does is, in the widest sense, for the public good. We fail, therefore, to find any radical contradiction, or indeed any contradiction at all, between the principle of competition and the maxim to which we have so often referred. We have only to think for one moment of what the world would be in the complete absence of competition—in other words, in the absence of. all means for selecting the fit and rejecting the unfit or the less fit—in order to see that competition in itself is not and can not be an evil. That