towns, so far as prices and competition are concerned, virtually coalesce.

As a matter of fact, smaller towns within twenty-five or fifty miles of large cities are placed in positions of great disadvantage by the rapid spread of electric car lines; they are made suburbs, and trade is seriously affected.

Cities attract trade with a force far beyond the economic advantages offered. Men and, especially, women like to do their shopping in the larger places, even though they lose car fare and time by doing so, and pay as much as their local merchants ask for the same goods.1

Railroads were slow in building compared with the phenomenally rapid spread of electric lines incident to the development of the trolley. The latter are so easily and inexpensively constructed they have spread everywhere within a few years; they and the telephone, with rural postal delivery, have brought the farmer into the city, until it is now as easy for the farmer's wife to do her shopping and marketing as it was for the townsman's wife a generation ago.

The parcel post will still further annihilate distance; it will place the department store and the big mail order house five hundred or a thousand miles away on a footing of equality with both the country and the city merchant; it will intensify competition by bringing in new and powerful factors.

The country merchant sees this, he reads the handwriting on the wall, and he joins hands with the express companies in opposing the parcel post. He is willing it should be tried on rural deliveries because that means he will be able to get his parcels delivered to his customers at a nominal cost while the city house will be excluded.

1"Not long ago the merchants of a Wisconsin city made vigorous protests against the low passenger charges to Chicago, in order to keep the people in the city from going to Chicago to purchase supplies." Prof. R. T. Ely, "Evolution of Industrial Society," pp. 249-250.

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But the parcel post is at hand and it will affect local trade very much as the railroads affected it years ago, very much as the trolleys have affected it in times more recentin short, precisely as every cheapening of transportation is bound to affect trade, by widening the competitive area.

II

There are two ways in which the competition of a given dealer or manufacturer may be increased:

(a) By the establishment of a rival in the locality— the intensive way: (b) by the widening of the area of competition by improvement in facilities for communication and transportation-the extensive way.

So far as the local merchant is concerned one may be as disastrous as the other, since both mean division of trade. So far as the community is concerned the effects are different. In the first case a new shop is added to the sum total of all in existence (unless it has been moved from some other place); in the second case no new capital is invested or labor employed, save as some additional may be required by the larger establishments to take care of the trade absorbed from the smaller.

In times past it was competition of the intensive sort that men feared and resented. The local carpenter, bricklayer, blacksmith, miller, merchant, fought the newcomer as an intruder.

The medieval guilds were organized in large part to protect localities against intensive competition-competition within the gates. The modern labor union, with its restrictions regarding apprentices, its opposition to immigration, and its arbitrary requirement that unionists from other places must take out local cards-if they can-fights intensive competition, the intrusion of the stranger.

Formerly extensive competition—the competition of distant localities-was a negligible quantity, made so by dif

ficulties in communication and transportation, by tariffs, taxes, brigandage, etc., etc. Nowadays it is the extensive competition, the competition of city with city, state with state, country with country, that is affecting prices and wages. And it is this competition that must be dealt with in a big way and a broad way. It cannot be suppressed, it cannot be checked, unless mankind wishes to suppress steam, gasoline, and electricity—but it may be controlled and transformed.

III

The history of nations shows how the pendulum of progress swings to and fro from perfection in little things to perfection in big things. At the same period one nation may be doing things intensively, while another is doing. things in a spirit of extension; one may be living a life of extraordinary fullness within its gates, another may find satisfaction only in conquering the earth.

Again at different periods the ambitions of mankind are widely different. For a time the nations are content within their borders, are absorbed in building their cities, their cathedrals, their monuments—in artistic and intellectual pursuits; the conflicts are few and personal or local in character; there is an astonishing development of every trade, every craft. Suddenly there comes a change, due, perhaps, to some great invention or discovery, or, perhaps, to the restless personality of some mighty leader who reflects the spirit of his times. The period of intense development is at an end; as if moved by one impulse the nations embark on a period of conquest, of discovery, of colonization; a period wherein local barriers are annihilated and countries come together in one grand clash, one supreme struggle either on the field of battle or in the more bloodless but none the less fierce rivalry for commercial and industrial victories.

We are in the midst of one of those great movements, one of those world-wide conflicts. It is so fierce that again and again are nations on the verge of declaring war for no reason whatsoever except trade jealousy. Projects of territorial expansion are justified by commercial reasons. Controversies concerning this country or that, over China, Persia, Turkey, are in substance, if not in form, trade controversies.

The world has gone mad over trade and the problems of trade. Financiers and diplomats exhaust their energies trying to devise new schemes, new treaties, new tariffs whereby one nation can sell the world more than it buys, whereby the "balance of trade" can be turned hither and thither at the will of man-this is the era of “dollar diplomacy."

The conquests of Alexander, of Cæsar, of Napoleon, were as nothing compared with the struggle that is now on for trade supremacy-a struggle that is made fiercer from year to year by marvelous inventions and developments in means of communication and transportation. Peoples, heretofore safe in their isolation, are swept into the maelstrom-the globe is a sizzling unit.1

IV

Intense competition makes for quality, extense for quantity.

At this moment the cry is not "how good," but "how much." In the mad race for wealth, for gross production, the beautiful is lost sight of, there is no love or longing for

1This forecast was written early in 1912 when the world seemingly was at peace. The prediction has been quickly realized. The bitterest-and true-cause of the present war is the rivalry of Germany and Great Britain for trade supremacy. This country has caught the virulent fever and is ambitious to reach out for the markets of the globe. We, too, seek war, for war will surely follow. Foreign trade is the most dangerous will-o'-the-wisp a nation can pursue; it is the great economic illusion.

perfection—it is "More, more, more-Oh God, give us more!"

With an indifference to the morrow that is criminal the earth is mined and denuded; future generations are being robbed of their patrimony; minerals, coal, iron, wood, are being rapidly exhausted.

It is true human ingenuity has met every emergency in the past and will probably suffice in the future; new forces, new resources will be discovered, but the surest relief from the present wasteful extensive competition which demands. quantity is the return to intense competition which is content with far less but demands greater perfection.

Again, extense competition means combination on a large scale; intense is the opportunity of the individual.

The effort to produce quantity leads inevitably to the organization of industry, to the factory system, the large corporation, the trust-a break-neck pace in which to halt is to fall.

The effort to produce quality means a reversal of these steps, the disintegration of the factors of wholesale and indiscriminate production until the individual is permitted to emerge and impress his personality upon his work.

The change is bound to come, and signs are not wanting that this country is getting tired of the mere production of wealth in gross. It is demanding better things. It is demanding more sightly things in even the most matter-offact industries and enterprises. Take railroading, for instance; the depots and bridges that satisfied everyone a generation ago would not be tolerated in a country town today. There is an immense amount of thought and labor given to the more artistic designing of all kinds of machinery. There is a growing appreciation of the efforts made by owners of factories to cultivate their grounds and build their buildings so they will please rather than offend the

eye.