ate the motive of profit and make it the basis of
business organization, and so far as this motive becomes dominant and
exclusive, business relations inevitably assume the impersonal character
so generally ascribed to them.

"Competition," says Walker, "is opposed to sentiment. Whenever any
economic agent does or forbears anything under the influence of any
sentiment other than the desire of giving the least and gaining the most
he can in exchange, be that sentiment patriotism, or gratitude, or
charity, or vanity, leading him to do otherwise than as self interest
would prompt, in that case also, the rule of competition is departed
from. Another rule is for the time substituted."[181]

This is the significance of the familiar sayings to the effect that one
"must not mix business with sentiment," that "business is business,"
"corporations are heartless," etc. It is just because corporations are
"heartless," that is to say impersonal, that they represent the most
advanced, efficient, and responsible form of business organization. But
it is for this same reason that they can and need to be regulated in
behalf of those interests of the community that cannot be translated
immediately into terms of profit and loss to the individual.

The plant community is the best illustration of the type of social
organization that is created by competitive co-operation because in the
plant community competition is unrestricted.

b) _Competition and freedom._--The economic organization of society,
so far as it is an effect of free competition, is an ecological
organization. There is a human as well as a plant and an animal ecology.

If we are to assume that the economic order is fundamentally ecological,
that is, created by the struggle for existence, an organization like
that of the plant community in which the relations between individuals
are conceivably at least wholly external, the question may be very
properly raised why the competition and the organization it has created
should be regarded as social at all. As a matter of fact sociologists
have generally identified the social with the moral order, and Dewey, in
his _Democracy and Education_, makes statements which suggest that the
purely economic order, in which man becomes a means rather than an end
to other men, is unsocial, if not anti-social.

The fact is, however, that this character of _externality_ in human
relations is a fundamental aspect of society and social life. It i