the declaration that careers should be open to talent, or the tools
given to him who could use them. Surely that was a sound principle; and
one which, so far as I can see, cannot be applied without stimulating
competition. The doctrine, indeed, is unpalatable to many Socialists.
To me, it seems to be one to which only the cowardly and the indolent
can object in principle. Will not a society be the better off, in which
every man is set to work upon the tasks for which he is most fitted? If
we allowed our teaching and our thinking to be done by blockheads; our
hard labour to be done by men whose muscles were less developed than
their brains; made our soldiers out of our cowards, and our sailors out
of the sea-sick,--should we be better off? It seems, certainly, to me,
that whatever may be the best constitution of society, one mark of it
will be the tendency to distribute all social functions according to
the fitness of the agents; to place trust where trust is justifiable,
and to give the fullest scope for every proved ability, intellectual,
moral, and physical. Of course, such approximation to this result, as
we can observe in the present order of things, is very imperfect. Many
of the most obvious evils in the particular system of competition now
adopted, may be summed up in the statement, that the tests according to
which success is awarded, are not so contrived as to secure the success
of the best competitors. Some of them, for example, are calculated to
give an advantage to the superficial and the showy. But that is to say
that they are incompatible with the true principle which they were
intended to embody; and that we should reform our method, not in the
direction of limiting competition, but in the direction of so framing
our system that it may be a genuine application of Carlyle's doctrine.
In other words, in all the professions for which intellectual
excellence is required, the conditions should be such as to give the
best man the best chance, as far as human arrangements can secure that
object. What other rule can be suggested? Competition, in this sense,
means the preservation of the very atmosphere which is necessary to
health; and to denounce it is either to confirm the most selfish and
retrograde principles, or to denounce something which is only called
competition by a confusion of ideas. How easy such a confusion may be,
is obvious when we look at the ordinary language about industrial
competition. We are told that wages are kept down by competition. To
this Mill replied in the passage I have quoted, and, upon his own
theory, at any rate, replied with perfect justice, that they were also
kept up by competition. The common language upon the subject is merely
one instance of the fallacies into which men fall when they personify
an abstraction. Competition becomes a kind of malevolent and
supernatural being, to whose powers no conceivable limits are assigned.
It is supposed to account for any amount of degradation. Yet if, by
multiplying their numbers, workmen increase supply, and so lower the
price of labour, it follows, conversely, by the very same reasoning,
that if they refused to multiply, they would diminish the supply and
raise the price. The force, by its very nature, operates as certainly
in one direction as in the other. If, again, there is competition among
workmen, there is competition among capitalists. In every strike, of
course, workmen apply the principle, and sometimes apply it very
effectually, in the attempt to raise their wages. It was often argued,
indeed, that in this struggle, the employer possessed advantages partly
due to his power of forming tacit combinations. The farmers in a
parish, or the manufacturers in a business, were pledged to each other
not to raise the rate of wages. If that be so, you again complain, not
of competition, but of the want of competition; and you agree that the
labourer will benefit, as in fact, I take it, he has undoubtedly
benefited, by freer competition among capitalists, or by the greater
power of removing his own labour to better markets. In such cases, the
very meaning of the complaint is not that there is competition, but
that the competition is so arranged as to give an unfair advantage to
one side. And a similar misunderstanding is obviously implied in other
cases. The Australian or American workman fears that his wages will be
lowered by the competition of the Chinese; and the Englishman protests
against the competition of pauper aliens. Let us assume that he is
right in believing that such competition will tend to lower his wages,
whatever the moral to be drawn from the fact. Briefly, denunciations of
"competition" in this sense are really complaints that we do not
exclude the Chinese immigrant and therefore give a monopoly to the
native labourer. That may be a good thing for him, and if it be not a
good thing for the Chinaman who is excluded from the field, we perhaps
do not care very much about the results to China. We are so much better
than the heathen that we need not bother about their interests. But, of
course, the English workman, when he complains of the intensity of
competition, does not propose to adopt the analogous remedy of giving a
monopoly to one section of our own population. The English pauper is
here; we do not want to suppress him, but only to suppress his
pauperism; and he certainly cannot be excluded from any share in the
fund devoted to the support of labour. The evil, therefore, of which we
complain is primarily the inadequacy of the support provided,
not,--though that may also be complained of,--the undesirable method by
which those funds are distributed. In other words, the complaint may so
far be taken to mean that there are too many competitors, not that,
given the competitors, their shares are determined by competition,
instead of being determined by monopoly or by some other principle.
We have therefore to inquire whether any principle can be suggested
which will effect the desired end, and which will yet really exclude
competition. The popular suggestion is that the remedy lies in
suppressing competition by equalising the prizes. If no prizes are to
be won, there will so far be less reason for competing. Enough may be
provided for all by simply taking something from those who have too
much. Now, I may probably assume that we all agree in approving the
contemplated end--a greater equality of wealth, and especially an
elevation of the lower classes to a higher position in the scale of
comfort. Every social reformer, whatever his particular creed, would
probably agree that some of us are too rich, and that a great many are
too poor. But we still have to ask, in what sense it is conceivable
that a real suppression of competition can contribute to the desired
end. It is obvious that when we denounce competition we often mean not
that it is to be abolished, but that it is to be regulated and limited
in its application. So, for example, people sometimes speak as if
competition were the antithesis to co-operation. But I need hardly say
that individualists, as well as their opponents, may legitimately sing
the praises of co-operation. Nobody was more forward than Mill, for
example, and Mill's followers, in advocating the principles of the
early co-operative societies. He and they rejoiced to believe that the
co-operative societies had revealed unsuspected virtues and capacities
in the class from which they sprang; that they had done much to raise
the standard of life and to extend sympathy and human relations among
previously disconnected units of society. But it is, of course, equally
obvious that they have grown up in a society which supposes free
competition in every part of its industrial system; that co-operative
societies, so far as the outside world is concerned, have to buy in the
cheapest and sell in the dearest market; that the rate of wages of
their members is still fixed by competition; and that they encourage
habits of saving and forethought which presuppose that each man is to
have private ends of his own. In what sense, then, can co-operation
ever be regarded as really opposed to competition? Competition may
exist among groups of men just as much as among individuals: a state of
war is not less a state of war if it is carried on by regiments and
armies, instead of by mere chaotic struggles in which each man fights
for his own hand. Competition does not mean that there should be no
combination, but that there should be no monopoly. So long as a trade
or a profession is open to every one who chooses to take it up, its
conduct will be equally regulated by competition, whether it be
competition as between societies or individuals, or whether its profits
be divided upon one system or another between the various classes
concerned. Co-operators, of course, may look forward to a day in which
society at large will be members of a single co-operative society; or,
again, to a time in which every industrial enterprise may be conducted
by the State. Supposing any such aspiration to be realised, the
question still remains, whether they would amount to the abolition or
still only to the shifting of the incidence of competition. Socialists
tell us that hitherto the labourer has not had his fair share of the
produce of industry. The existing system has sanctioned a complicated
chicanery, by which one class has been enabled to live as mere
bloodsuckers and parasites upon the rest of society. Property is the
result of theft, instead of being, as Economists used to assure us, the
reward of thrift. It is hoped that these evils may be remedied by a
reconstruction of society, in which the means of production shall all
be public property, and every man's income be simply a salary in
proportion to the quantity of his labour. If we, then, ask how far
competition would be abolished, we may first make one remark. Such a
system, like every other system, requires, for its successful working,
that the instincts and moral impulses should correspond to the demands
of the society. Absolute equality of property is just as compatible
with universal misery as with universal prosperity. A population made
up of thoroughly lazy, sensual, stupid individuals could, if it chose,
work such a machinery so as to suppress all who were industrious,
refined and intelligent. However great may be the revenue of a nation,
it is a very simple problem of arithmetic to discover how many people
could be supported just above the starvation level. The nation at large
would, on the supposed system, have to decide how its numbers and wants
are to be proportioned to its means. If individuals do not compete, the
whole society has, presumably, to compete with other societies; and, in
every case whatever, with the general forces of nature. An indolent and
inefficient majority might decide, if it pleased, that the amount of
work to be exacted should be that which would be just enough to provide
the simplest material necessities. If, again, the indolent and
inefficient are to exist at all,--and we can scarcely count upon their
disappearance,--and if further, they are to share equally with the
industrious and the efficient, we must, in some way, coerce them into
the required activity. If every industrial organisation is to be worked
by the State, the State, it would seem, must appeal to the only means
at its disposal,--namely, the prison and the scourge. If, moreover, the
idle and sensual choose to multiply, the State must force them to
refrain, or the standard of existence will be lowered. And, therefore,
as is often argued, Socialism logically carried out would, under such
conditions, lead to slavery; to a state in which labour would be
enforced, and the whole system of life absolutely regulated by the will
of the majority; and, in the last resort, by physical force. That
seems, I confess, to be a necessary result, unless you can assume a
moral change, which is entirely different from the mere change of
machinery, and not necessarily implied, nor even made probable, by the
change. The intellectual leaders of Socialism, no doubt, assume that
the removal of "injustice" will lead to the development of a public
spirit which will cause the total efficiency to be as great as it is at
present, or perhaps greater. But the mass who call themselves
Socialists take, one suspects, a much simpler view. They are moved by
the very natural, but not especially lofty, desire to have more wages
and less work. They take for granted that if their share of the total
product is increased, they will get a larger dividend; and do not stop
to inquire whether the advantage may be not more than counterbalanced
by the diminution of the whole product, when the present incitements to
industry are removed. They argue,--that is, so far as they argue at
all,--as though the quantity to be distributed were a fixed quantity,
and regard capitalists as pernicious persons, somehow intercepting a
lion's share of the stream of wealth which, it is assumed, would flow
equally if they were abolished. That is, of course, to beg the whole
question.
I, however, shall venture to assume that the industrial machinery
requires a corresponding moral force to work it; and I, therefore,
proceed to ask how such a force can be supposed to act without some
form of competition. Nothing, as a recent writer suggests,--ironically,
perhaps,--could be easier than to secure an abolition of competition.
You have only to do two things: to draw a "ring-fence" round your
society, and then to proportion the members within the fence to the
supplies. The remark suggests the difficulty. A ring-fence, for
example, round London or Manchester would mean the starvation of
millions in a month; or, if round England, the ruin of English
commerce, the enormous rise in the cost of the poor man's food, and the
abolition of all his little luxuries. But, if you include even a
population as large as London, what you have next to do is to drill
some millions of people--vast numbers of them poor, reckless, ignorant,
sensual, and selfish--to regulate their whole mode of life by a given
code, and refrain from all the pleasures which they most appreciate.
The task is a big one, and not the less if you have also to undertake
that everybody, whatever his personal qualities, shall have enough to
lead a comfortable life. I do not suppose, however, that any rational
Socialist would accept that programme of isolation. He would hold that,
in his Utopia, we can do more efficiently all that is done under a
system which he regards as wasteful and unjust. The existing machinery,
whatever else may be said of it, does, in fact, tend to weld the whole
world more and more into a single industrial organism. English workmen
are labouring to satisfy the wants of other human beings in every
quarter of the world; while Chinese, and Africans, and Europeans, and
Americans are also labouring to satisfy theirs. This vast and almost
inconceivably complex machinery has grown up in the main unconsciously,
or, at least, with a very imperfect anticipation of the ultimate
results, by the independent efforts of innumerable inventors, and
speculators, and merchants, and manufacturers, each of them intent, as
a rule, only upon his own immediate profits and the interests of the
little circle with which he is in immediate contact. The theory is not,
I suppose, that this gigantic system of mutual interdependence should
be abolished or restricted, but that it should be carried on
consciously, with definite and intelligible purpose, and in such a way
as to promote the interests of every fraction of society. The whole
organism should resemble one worked by a single brain, instead of
representing the resultant of a multitude of distracted and conflicting
forces. The difficulties are obvious enough, nor need I dwell upon them
here. I will not inquire whether it does not suppose something like
omniscience in the new industrial leaders; and whether the restless and
multifarious energy now displayed in discovering new means of
satisfying human wants could be supplied by a central body, or a number
of central bodies, made up of human beings, and, moreover, official
human beings, reluctant to try experiments and strike into new courses,
and without the present motives for enterprise, "Individualists" have
enlarged sufficiently upon such topics. What I have to note is that, in
any case, the change supposes the necessity of a corresponding morality
in the growth of the instincts, the public spirit, the hatred of
indolence, the temperance and self-command which would be requisite to
work it efficiently. The organisation into which we are born
presupposes certain moral instincts, and, moreover, necessarily implies
a vast system of moral discipline. Our hopes and aspirations, our
judgments of our neighbours and of ourselves, are at every moment
guided and moulded by the great structure of which we form a part.
Whenever we ask how our lives are to be directed, what are to be the
terms on which we form our most intimate ties, whom we are to support
or suppress, how we are to win respect or incur contempt, we are
profoundly affected by the social relations in which we are placed at
our birth, and the corresponding beliefs or prejudices which we have
unconsciously imbibed. Such influences, it may perhaps be said, are of
incomparably greater importance than the direct exhortations to which
we listen, or than the abstract doctrines which we accept in words, but
which receive their whole colouring from the concrete facts to which
they conform. Now, I ask how such discipline can be conceived without
some kind of competition; or, rather, what would be the discipline
which would remain if, in some sense, competition could be suppressed?
If in the ideal society there are still prizes to be won, positions
which may be the object of legitimate desire, and if those positions
are to be open to every one, whatever his circumstances, we might still
have the keenest competition, though carried on by different methods.
If, on the other hand, no man's position were to be better than
another's, we might suppress competition at the price of suppressing
every motive for social as well as individual improvement. In any
conceivable state of things, the welfare of every society, the total
means of enjoyment at its disposal, must depend upon the energy,
intelligence, and trustworthiness of its constituent members. Such
qualities, I need hardly say, are qualities of individuals. Unless John
and Peter and Thomas are steady, industrious, sober, and honest, the
society as a whole will be neither honest nor sober nor prosperous. The
problem, then, becomes, how can you ensure the existence of such
qualities unless John and Peter and the rest have some advantage in
virtue of possessing them? Somehow or other, a man must be the better
off for doing his work well and treating his neighbour fairly. He ought
surely to hold the positions in which such qualities are most required,
and to have, if possible, the best chance of being a progenitor of the
rising generation. A social condition in which it made no difference to
a man, except so far as his own conscience was concerned, whether he
were or were not honest, would imply a society favourable to people
without a conscience, because giving full play to the forces which make
for corruption and disintegration. If you remove the rewards accessible
to the virtuous and peaceful, how are you to keep the penalties which
restrain the vicious and improvident? A bare repeal of the law, "If a
man will not work, neither shall he eat," would not of itself promote
industry. You would at most remove the compulsion which arises from
competition, to introduce the compulsion which uses physical force. You
would get rid of what seems to some people the "natural" penalty of
want following waste, and be forced to introduce the "artificial" or
legislative penalty of compulsory labour. But, otherwise, you must
construct your society so that, by the spontaneous play of society, the
purer elements may rise to the surface, and the scum sink to the
bottom. So long as human nature varies indefinitely, so long as we have
knaves and honest men, sinners and saints, cowards and heroes, some
process of energetic and active sifting is surely essential to the
preservation of social health; and it is difficult to see how that is
conceivable without some process of active and keen competition.
The Socialist will, of course, say, and say with too much truth, that
the present form of competition is favourable to anti-social qualities.
If, indeed, a capitalist is not a person who increases the productive
powers of industry, but a person who manages simply to intercept a
share produced by the industry of others, there is, of course, much to
be said for this view. I cannot now consider that point, for my subject
to-day is the moral aspect of competition considered generally. And
what I have just said suggests what is, I think, the more purely moral
aspect of the question. A reasonable Socialist desires to maintain what
is good in the existing system, while suppressing its abuses. The
question, What is good? is partly economical; but it is partly also
ethical: and it is with that part that I am at present concerned.
Any system of competition, any system which supposes a reward for
virtue other than virtue itself, may be accused of promoting
selfishness and other ugly qualities. The doctrine that virtue is its
own reward is very charming in the mouth of the virtuous man; but when
his neighbours use it as an excuse for not rewarding him, it becomes
rather less attractive. It saves a great deal of trouble, no doubt, and
relieves us from an awkward responsibility. I must, however, point out,
in the first place, that a fallacy is often introduced into these
discussions which Mr. Herbert Spencer has done a great deal to expose.
He has dwelt very forcibly, for example, on the fact that it is a duty
to be happy and healthy; and that selfishness, if used in a bad sense,
should not mean simply regard for ourselves, but only disregard for our
neighbours. We ought not, in other words, to be unjust because we
ourselves happen to be the objects of injustice. The parable of the
good Samaritan is generally regarded as a perfect embodiment of a great
moral truth. Translated from poetry into an abstract logical form, it
amounts to saying that we should do good to the man who most needs our
services, whatever be the accidents which alienate ordinary sympathies.
Now, suppose that the good Samaritan had himself fallen among thieves,
what would have been his duty? His first duty, I should say, would have
been, if possible, to knock down the thief; his second, to tie up his
own wounds; and his third, to call in the police. We should not,
perhaps, call him virtuous for such conduct; but we should clearly
think him wrong for omitting it. Not to resist a thief is cowardly; not
to attend to your own health is to incapacitate yourself for duty; not
to apply to the police is to be wanting in public spirit. Assuming
robbery to be wrong, I am not the less bound to suppress it because I
happen to be the person robbed; I am only bound not to be
vindictive--that is, not to allow my personal feelings to make me act
otherwise than I should act if I had no special interest in the
particular case. Adam Smith's favourite rule of the "indifferent
spectator" is the proper one in the case. I should be impartial, and
incline no more to severity than to lenity, because I am forced by
circumstances to act both as judge and as plaintiff. So, in questions
of self-support, it is obviously a fallacy to assume that an action,
directed in the first instance to a man's own benefit, is therefore to
be stigmatised as selfish. On the good Samaritan's principle, a person
should be supported, _ceteris paribus_, by the person who can do
it most efficiently, and in nine cases out of ten that person is
himself. If self-support is selfish in the sense that the service is
directly rendered to self, it is not the less unselfish in so far as it
is necessarily also a service to others. If I keep myself by my labour,
I am preventing a burden from falling upon my fellows. And, of course,
the case is stronger when I include my family. We were all impressed
the other day by the story of the poor boy who got some wretchedly
small pittance by his work, spent a small portion of it upon his own
needs, and devoted the chief part of it to trying to save his mother
and her other children from starvation. Was he selfish? Was he selfish
even in taking something for himself, as the only prop of his family?
What may be the immediate motive of a man when he is working for his
own bread and the bread of his family may often be a difficult
question; but as, in point of fact, he is helping not only himself and
those who depend on him, but also in some degree relieving others from
a burden, his conduct must clearly not be set down as selfish in any
sense which involves moral disapproval.