You will hear people abuse the Socialists for wishing to abolish competition. No Socialist wishes to abolish competition, no modern Socialist at any rate. He watches competition, as the mischievous Irishmen watched the Kilkenny cats; keeping off at a suitable distance during the battle, and simply proposing to the spectators that when it is all over they shall recognise the accomplished fact.
There is some competition in the world to-day among the nations; there was recently competition between Russia and Japan, and there will perhaps be competition between some of the others. But what competition is left to-day within the limits of the United States, is left simply because it is of a kind so petty that the capitalists have not yet had time to bother with it. For the most part it exists between a swarm of retailers of trust-made products, and takes the form of the screwing down of the wages of helpless clerks and errand-boys, the adulteration of products, and the placarding of the surface of the land with blatant advertisements which affect a decent man like the stench of a carcass. One of the “competitive” industries that is flourishing just now is that of cereals prepared in packages and labelled with names that suggest Hiawatha and the South Sea Islands. The usual price of one of these packages is fifteen cents, and of that, two cents and a half represents the cost of the product, and nearly all of the balance goes into the effort to trap the public into buying it. And did not the “boodle” investigations in Missouri disclose the fact that William Ziegler had spent a fortune in bribing newspapers and legislatures to implant in the public mind the idea that “alum baking-powders” were poisonous, so that the Royal Baking Powder Trust might have the custom of the country?
But, you say, if competition perishes, what becomes of incentive—of initiative? Will not individual enterprise be destroyed? I answer that it depends entirely upon what you mean by individual enterprise. If you mean that ardent desire which now consumes every man to cut his neighbour’s economic throat, to get the better of him and make money out of him, to beat him down and leave him a financial wreck—why, civilisation will suppress this ardent desire in precisely the same way that it has suppressed the duel, or the right of private vengeance, and piracy, or the right of private war upon the high seas. The putting down of these things went hard, you know, for they had been the greatest glory of men, and all progress has been due to them. “Franz von Sickingen was a robber-knight,” writes Henderson, in his “History of Germany,” “but with such noble traits, and such a concept of his calling, that one wonders if he ought not rather to be put on the level of a belligerent prince. In carrying on feuds, he seldom aimed lower than a duke, or a free city of the Empire; and there are persons who insist to this day that his weapons were only drawn in favour of the oppressed. Be that as it may, he was not above exacting enormous fines; and being an excellent manager, he greatly increased his possessions. He was lord of many castles, which he furnished with splendid defences.”
And then the historian goes on to describe the gallant struggle of this old nobleman against the advancing power of the Empire. “He determined, by one brilliant feud, to restore the tarnished splendour of his name. He would help the whole order of knighthood to assert itself against the power of the princes.” The end of it was that “the enemy appeared in full force, demolished in a single day an outer tower with walls the thickness of twenty feet, and made a breach in the actual ramparts.” Having been wounded, “the grim commander was carried to a dark, deep vault of the castle, where it was thought he would be safe from the cannon-balls of his pursuers; such an unchristian shooting, he declared to an attendant, he had never heard in all his days.” The castle surrendered, and his foes gathered about him. “He had now to do, he said, with a greater lord, and a few hours later he closed his eyes. The three princes knelt at his side and prayed God for the peace of his soul.” Let us hope that the makers of our Industrial Republic will not forget to pray for the souls of Baer and Parry, if these gallant captains of industry should perish in defending the elemental right of a capitalist to manage his own business in his own way.
This is all very well, you say, but will not such a system decrease production? I rather think that it will; I hope to see the prophecy of Annie Besant come true, that when men no longer have to struggle to get a living, they will at last begin to live. That they will at last open their eyes to the world of books and music, of nature and art, of friendship and love, that stretches out its arms to them; that they will cease to regard ingenuity and rapidity in the production of material things as the final end and goal of the creation of man; that they will cease to look upon a human being as a machine for the getting of money—to be valued like an automobile, by the number of miles an hour it can be driven, by the number of thousands of miles it can cover before it is worn out and ready for the scrap-heap.
Let us have the philosophy of this thing, in order that we may understand it. We saw that the process of evolution, in an individual or in a society, consists of an expansion and a struggle, the end of which is the emergence of the organism into a higher state of being. There is a certain life impulse, and there is a certain environment, certain difficulties with which it contends. We have perhaps no right to speak of purpose in the process, but we have a right to speak of results; and the result of this contest is to shape the organism, to educate it, to bring out certain qualities in it which it did not possess before; until finally it triumphs over its environment, and emerges from its prison-house.
The struggle for life goes on, but the form of it changes unceasingly; and this changing is progress. Without it there can be none—the very essence of progress consists in the suppressing of old forms of strife, the conquest of old difficulties and the escape from their thraldom. We know that there was once a time when men were hairy beings who dwelt in caves, and contended with club and hatchet against the monsters which assailed them; and now supposing that we could take some man of modern times, some one who has risen to eminence and power under the conditions which now prevail, and put him among those cavemen, how do you suppose that he would make out? How do you suppose that he would fare, if he were placed even one century back, in the country of the Iroquois, where the snapping of a twig and the flight of an arrow decided the fate of a man? Is it not obvious that there has been here an entire change in the form of the struggle for existence?
The same thing is true of nations. Once upon a time a nation was an army, and fighting was its business, the conquering of its neighbours was its glory and its ideal; but now we have moved on, we have become complex and highly organised, and can no longer afford to conquer our neighbours. It would not pay us financially, and intellectually and morally it would destroy us. We have, for instance, a powerful country to the north of us; and imagine what would be the inconvenience and waste were we under the necessity of fortifying all our boundary lines, and keeping garrisons at every few miles of them; if every day we were shaken by rumours that an army was gathering at Montreal, that a fleet of torpedo-boats was building at Toronto. As a matter of simple fact, do we not both go quietly on our way, understanding that we are two civilised nations, between which a war of conquest would be an unthinkable crime?
We have grown to used to the change, that the mere memory of the old ways of life makes us shudder; it seems to us horrible, and we forget that it was once beautiful and delightful to men: that the Germans of the time of Tacitus held fighting the joy of life, and imagined a heaven where a man might be patched up every night and fight again the next day. We have passed so far beyond such a state that we cannot even imagine it, and we have lost the power of seeing that it was ever necessary and right; that to those long ages of struggle we owe our physical being, with all its perfections, which we take so as a matter of course; a swift foot and a dexterous hand, an ear attuned to every sound, an eye that adjusts itself to every distance, a mind quick and alert, a spirit bold and enterprising. And in the same way the nations owe to war their unity and their complexity, and a great deal of their power, not merely physical, but industrial and moral as well.
It was one of the noblest of the world’s poets who wrote that: