industry to which the individual has a natural right, Adam Smith, in his
book _The Wealth of Nations_, emphasized the advantages of competition.
To him competition was a protection against monopoly. "It [competition]
can never hurt either the consumer or the producer; on the contrary it
must tend to make the retailers both sell cheaper and buy dearer than if
the whole trade was monopolized by one or two persons!"[198] It was at
the same time of benefit to both producer and consumer. "Monopoly is a
great enemy to good management which can never be universally
established but in consequence of that free and universal competition
which forces everybody to have recourse to it for the sake of
self-defence."[199]

Before Darwin, competition had been conceived in terms of freedom and of
the natural harmony of interests. His use of the term introduced into
competition the notion of struggle for existence and the survival of the
fittest. This new conception, in which competition appears as a
fundamental process in all life, has been a powerful prop to the laissez
faire policy and has led to its continuance regardless of the misery and
destitution which, if it did not create, it certainly did not remedy.
The works of Herbert Spencer, the greatest expounder of the doctrine of
evolution, contain a powerful massing of evidence in favor of laissez
faire as a conclusion to be drawn from a scientific study of human
behavior. "Nothing but the slow modifications of human nature by the
discipline of social life," he said, "can produce permanently
advantageous changes. A fundamental error pervading the thinking of
nearly all parties, political and social, is that evils admit of
immediate and radical remedies."[200]

With the growth of large-scale production with the tendency to the
formation of combinations and monopolies, as a result of freedom of
competition, works began to appear on the subject of unrestricted
competition. The expressions "unfair" and "cut-throat" competition,
which occur frequently in recent literature, suggest the new point of
view. Another euphemism under which other and more far-reaching
proposals for the limitation of competition and laissez faire have been
proposed is "social justice." In the meantime the trend of legislation
in England for a hundred years, as Mr. A. V. Dicey[201] has pointed out,
has been, in spite of Herbert Spencer, away from the individualistic and
in the direction of a collectivistic social