Page:Social Justice without Socialism.djvu/18

 between different producers which has always been the guaranty of technical progress. That such progress has gone on with bewildering rapidity since the invention of the steam engine is nowhere denied; and neither is it denied that competition of the normal kind—the effort of rivals to excel in productive processes—has caused it. It has multiplied the product of labor here tenfold, there, twentyfold, and elsewhere a hundredfold and more.

This increased power to produce has rescued us from an appalling evil. Without it, such a crowding of population as some countries have experienced would have carried their peoples to and below the starvation level. Machinery now