It is a mistake to suppose that the unrestrained play of mere natural forces ensures progress. Occasional advance is the outcome, but so also is frequent retrogression. There is no scientific basis for the belief in a natural order that everywhere and always makes for progress. Competition or the struggle for existence ensures at most merely the survival of the fittest; but survival of the fittest does not always mean survival of the best. Competition is nature's means of adapting life to its environment. If the environment is such as to give the more highly organized individuals the advantage, progress is the result. But if it is such as to place them at a disadvantage, retrogression, not progress, is the outcome. The higher types of character, no less than the higher organic forms, presuppose external conditions favorable to their development. Competition is merely the means through which conformity to these external conditions is enforced. It eliminates alike that which is better than the environment and that which is worse. It is indifferent to good or bad, to high or low. It simply picks out, preserves and perpetuates those types best suited to environing conditions. Both progress and retrogression are a process of adaptation, and their cause must be sought, not in the principle of competition itself, but in the general external conditions to which it enforces conformity. Success, then, is a matter of adaptation to the environment, or the power to use it for individual ends—not the power to improve and enrich it. The power to take from, is nature's sole test of fitness to live; but the power to enrich is a higher test, and one which society must enforce through appropriate legislation.
Laws, institutions and methods of trade which make it possible for the individual to take from more than he adds to the general resources of society tend inevitably toward general social deterioration. Competition is wholesome only when all our social arrangements are such as to discourage and repress all individual activities not in harmony with the general interests of society. This is the point of view from which all social and industrial questions must be studied. The problem which democracy has to solve is the problem of so organizing the environment as to assure progress through the success and survival of the best.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Sebohm, English Village Community, Ch. III; Traill, Social England, Vol. I, p. 240; Ashley, English Economic History, Vol. I, p. 17.
[2] Lowell, Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, Vol. I, Ch. I; Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, p. 265.
[3] Work and Wages, p. 398.
[4] Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution, Vol. I, p. 300.
[5] Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution, Vol. I, p. 301.
[6] Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
[7] Delaware, Maryland and North Carolina.