order. This means more
legislation, more control, and less individual liberty.

The full meaning of this change in law and opinion can only be fully
understood, however, when it is considered in connection with the growth
of communication, economic organization, and cities, all of which have
so increased the mutual interdependence of all members of society as to
render illusory and unreal the old freedoms and liberties which the
system of laissez faire was supposed to guarantee.

3. Competition and Human Ecology

The ecological conception of society is that of a society created by
competitive co-operation. Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ was a
description of society in so far as it is a product of economic
competition. David Ricardo, in his _Principles of Political Economy_,
defined the process of competition more abstractly and states its
consequences with more ruthless precision and consistency. "His theory,"
says Kolthamer in his introduction, "seems to be an everlasting
justification of the _status quo_. As such at least it was used."

But Ricardo's doctrines were both "a prop and a menace to the middle
classes," and the errors which they canonized have been the
presuppositions of most of the radical and revolutionary programs since
that time.

The socialists, adopting his theories of value and wages,
interpreted Ricardo's crude expressions to their own advantage.
To alter the Ricardian conclusions, they said, alter the social
conditions upon which they depend: to improve upon subsistence
wage, deprive capital of what it steals from labour--the value
which labour creates. The land-taxers similarly used the
Ricardian theory of rent: rent is a surplus for the existence
of which no single individual is responsible--take it therefore
for the benefit of all, whose presence creates it.[202]

The anarchistic, socialistic, and communistic doctrines, to which
reference is made in the bibliography, are to be regarded as themselves
sociological phenomena, without reference to their value as programs.
They are based on ecological and economic conceptions of society in
which competition is the fundamental fact and, from the point of view of
these doctrines, the fundamental evil of society. What is sociologically
important in these doctrines is the wishes that they express. They
exhibit among other things, at any rate, the character which the hopes
and the wishes of men take