ime were traditional could not account. It was a new industrial world
which called for a modernized system of economic doctrine. Ricardo was
the first to understand the situation, to trace the new tendencies to
their consummation, and to create a scientific system by insight and
foresight. He outran history in the process, and mentally created a
world more relentlessly competitive than any which has existed; and yet
it was fact and not imagination that lay at the basis of the whole
system. Steam had been utilized, machines were supplanting hand labor,
workmen were migrating to new centers of production, guild regulations
were giving way, and competition of a type unheard of before was
beginning to prevail.

A struggle for existence had commenced between parties of unequal
strength. In manufacturing industries the balance of power had been
disturbed by steam, and the little shops of former times were
disappearing. The science adapted to such conditions was an economic
Darwinism; it embodied the laws of a struggle for existence between
competitors of the new and predatory type and those of the peaceable
type which formerly possessed the field. Though the process was savage,
the outlook which it afforded was not wholly evil. The survival of crude
strength was, in the long run, desirable. Machines and factories meant,
to every social class, cheapened goods and more comfortable living.
Efficient working establishments were developing; the social organism
was perfecting itself for its contest with crude nature. It was a fuller
and speedier dominion over the earth which was to result from the
concentration of human energy now termed centralization.

The error unavoidable to the theorists of the time lay in basing a
scientific system on the facts afforded by a state of revolution. This
was attempting to derive permanent principles from transient phenomena.
Some of these principles must become obsolete; and the work demanded of
modern economists consists in separating the transient from the
permanent in the Ricardian system. How much of the doctrine holds true
when the struggle between unequal competitors is over, and when a few of
the very strongest have possession of the field?

In most branches of manufacturing, and in other than local
transportation, the contest between the strong and the weak is either
settled or in process of rapid settlement. The survivors are becoming so
few, so powerful, and so nearly equal that if th