s and races of men and incidentally has raised
the despised middleman to a position of affluence and power undreamed of
by superior classes of any earlier age. And now there is a new demand
for the control of competition in the interest, not merely of those who
have not shared in the general prosperity, but in the interest of
competition itself.

"Unfair competition" is an expression that is heard at the present time
with increasing frequency. This suggests that there are rules governing
competition by which, in its own interest, it can and should be
controlled. The same notion has found expression in the demand for
"freedom of competition" from those who would safeguard competition by
controlling it. Other voices have been raised in denunciation of
competition because "competition creates monopoly." In other words,
competition, if carried to its logical conclusion, ends in the
annihilation of competition. In this destruction of competition by
competition we seem to have a loss of freedom by freedom, or, to state
it in more general terms, unlimited liberty, without social control,
ends in the negation of freedom and the slavery of the individual. But
the limitation of competition by competition, it needs to be said, means
simply that the process of competition tends invariably to establish an
equilibrium.

The more fundamental objection is that in giving freedom to economic
competition society has sacrificed other fundamental interests that are
not directly involved in the economic process. In any case economic
freedom exists in an order that has been created and maintained by
society. Economic competition, as we know it, presupposes the existence
of the right of private property, which is a creation of the state. It
is upon this premise that the more radical social doctrines, communism
and socialism, seek to abolish competition altogether.

2. Competition a Process of Interaction

Of the four great types of interaction--competition, conflict,
accommodation, and assimilation--competition is the elementary,
universal and fundamental form. Social contact, as we have seen,
initiates interaction. But competition, strictly speaking, is
_interaction without social contact_. If this seems, in view of what has
already been said, something of a paradox, it is because in human
society competition is always complicated with other processes, that is
to say, with conflict, assimilation, and accommodation.

It is only in the