triumph of the strong, it meant methods so questionable they are now condemned as criminal.

The old, with its unfair advantages, its secret prices and rebates, its conspiracies to ruin competitors, help favored parties, localities, towns, at the expense of others, is passing; the new is taking its place, is winning its way in spite of ignorant clamor, regardless of legislative enactments, in the face of hampering decisions; it is winning its way because, fundamentally, it is right—it is progress.

CHAPTER II

WHAT IS COMPETITION?

I

What is competition?

The man in the street laughs at the question: "Why, everybody knows what competition is."

"Well, what is it?"

"It is the effort of the other fellow to get my job," the laborer cries.

"It is the effort of the other man to get my customers," the merchant and manufacturer respond.

"It is the fierce struggle for life and means, the elimination of the weak, the survival of the strong," the biologist says, and dismisses the subject.

Is it so?

Then competition is not worth preserving; it is a biological rather than an economic, a natural rather than a human condition; it is part of the philosophy of evolution rather than a matter of ethics; it is on a level with those relentless forces with which men are striving; like the familiar doctrine of the "survival of the fittest" it is more than non-human it is inhuman.

II

Granted that the universe is an evolution, that man is an evolution, that society is an evolution-that all are products

of that one fundamental law, the survival of the fittest, which is neither more nor less than competition in its fiercest form-what then?

Do we pass laws to foster this competition, to make it more certain that the weak disappear and the strong survive? Do we bend all our efforts to that end?

No, only in the breeding of plants and animals do we try to aid the law of natural selection, and even with animals we are tender toward the sick and old-toward those nature is trying to eliminate. We even pass laws to protect them and organize societies to help them.

When it comes to human beings only savages permit the law of the survival of the fittest to work unchecked; they expose infants, abandon the sick, kill the aged-they are evolutionists without human compunctions, they are biologists without hearts.

Civilized man, in his struggle for existence, forgets that law which the evolutionist says is the foundation of progress. Were it not for a few savage examples to the contrary we might say he fights it instinctively.

But fight it he does with laws, with customs, with moral sanctions, with social conventions, with individual standards of right and wrong, with praise for those who sacrifice their lives for others, with words of scorn for the selfish and cowardly-in short, with almost every legal, social, and moral force do men fight for the preservation of the sick, the weak, the helpless, the very beings the cold doctrine of evolution says should be eliminated.

Of the struggles for existence in the animal world Huxley said, "The creatures are fairly well treated and set to fight; whereby the strongest, the swiftest, the cunningest, live to fight another day."

Of the struggle in the human world he says in a later lecture, "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic forces at every step, and the substitution of another, which

may be the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect to the whole of the conditions which exist-but of those who are ethically the best."

And the proof of the ethically best, of the purest and loftiest souls, lies in the care taken of, and the sacrifices made for, the weak, the idiotic, the insane, the criminal-if you please.

In the language of another, "If it be true that reason must direct the course of human evolution, and if it be also true that selection of the fittest is the only method available for that purpose, then, if we are to have any race improvement at all, the dreadful law of the destruction of the weak and helpless must, with Spartan firmness, be carried out voluntarily and deliberately. Against such a course all that is best in us revolts."

III

In his social relations man has made vast strides in advance of the bald biological proposition, progress is a survival of the fittest.

In his commercial and industrial relations he is in that savage condition wherein the "destruction of the weak and helpless" is carried out, not only "voluntarily and deliberately" and "with Spartan firmness," but with precisely the satisfaction a Roman audience watched one gladiator slay another, or a wild beast devour a Christian.

A distinguished professor says: "The big company has a right to beat the little one in an honest race for cheapness in making and selling goods; but it has no right to foul its competitor and disable it by an underhand blow." 1

That is the theory of the thorough-going evolutionist'Prof. John B. Clark, "The Control of Trusts," p. 15.

the "big fellow" has the right to survive because he has the brute force, the "little fellow" must and should go to the wall in order that the "fittest" may live and the commercial race be improved!

Strange how these crude propositions drawn from natural development persist in the field of economics long after they have disappeared from the field of ethics.

In all social, mental, moral progress, in their daily lives, men give the lie to the proposition that the strong have the right to elbow the weak to one side; on the contrary, it is recognized that the most precious privilege of the strong is the succoring of the weak-that is life at its best.

If such is the law of man's social, intellectual, and moral development, why should not the same high obligations obtain in his commercial and industrial development?

That is a question every writer, every speaker on the subject should ask himself, and remain silent until the answer comes, for at heart it is not a question of making money but of making men.

It is a question every legislator should be able to answer before he frames new laws to encourage the old, the natural, the brutal competition.

Why pass laws to help one man to get the work, the customer, the livelihood, the very bread of another? Why copy nature in her most drastic mood?

IV

Nature is merciless, she knows no pity. "Survival of the fittest" is her goal. The way is strewn with corpses of the weak, with the débris of the rejected. Nature has no use for the lame, the halt, and the blind; her prizes are to the strong, and to only those of the strong who have no heart, who unfeelingly trample on the necks of others. The