eed of unrestrained
competition" but does not grasp the idea that under conditions of
justice unrestrained competition would be an advantage, constantly
leading men to emulate each other, and becoming a sure guarantee of
progress. It is the competition of those who have nothing but their
labor, or their brains, or their capital to sell with the owners of
vast monopolies who exact from production an ever-increasing toll that
needs to be restrained, and this not by abolishing "the custom of
working by contract," or by state interference and legislative
tinkering, to which the Pope leans in spite of his protests against
socialism, but by the abolition of the monopolies or their absorption
into the functions of the state.

The Pope is almost a Spencerian in his bias towards individualism, but
he forgets that individualism can never be maintained in practice
except through the assumption by the state of those monopolies which,
if left in private hands, would benefit the few at the expense of the
many. True individualism requires equality of opportunity. The instant
the idea of monopoly enters, equality of opportunity becomes
impossible, and individualism is destroyed. It is through want of
seeing this fact that the Pope, in common with most political
economists, goes floundering round in a sea of contradictions, now
proclaiming principles almost like those of the anarchists, and again
favoring extreme socialism, while all the time imagining himself an
individualist. Their theories remind one of the labored attempts to
explain the solar system by the old Ptolemaic method of epicycles and
deferents, when the one simple law of centripetal and centrifugal
force was enough to account for all the majestic movements of the
universe. What other outcome can there be of this want of a regulator
in economics--like a governor in machinery--than an endeavor to patch
up the machine of humanity, adding a little here, taking off a little
there, doing the best that occasion seems to allow, and all the while
impressed with a profound and sad conviction that the machine is in a
bad way, and certain to smash up, whatever is done? Consequently we
have just such weak documents as this encyclical letter, emanating now
from an eminent agnostic scientist, now from a millionnaire
"philanthropist" and now from the Pope--all conflicting with each
other, the first denying that man has any more rights than a
rattlesnake, the second lauding a "triumphant