an internal
expansiveness towards fuller kinds of existence, drawn out or checked by
the environment.

Competition plays a prominent part when there is question of the lower
grades of life, in so far as these depend on a pabulum that is limited
in quantity. In such cases competition, within certain limits, will
secure the bringing-out of latent powers by which the lower level of
life is maintained and a higher level entered upon; the lower being
secured by the superimposition of the higher.

But how does it do so? Not by creating anything, but by giving the
victory to those individuals who already were ahead of their fellows in
virtue of a fuller development of their nature from within; in clearing
the ground for them and letting them increase and multiply.

2. Again, we should notice that development in one direction may be at
the cost of development in another. The struggle for any lower form of
existence than that already attained, is inevitably at the cost of the
higher. The degrading effects of destitution are proverbial. Craft,
cruelty, selfishness, and all the vices needed for success in a
gladiatorial contest are often the fruits of such competition. Also,
commercial progress seems on the whole to be at the expense of progress
in art and the higher tastes, sacrificing everything to the production
of the greatest possible quantity of material comforts. If it sharpens
the wits and sensibilities in some directions, it blunts them in others.

Now, the first sense suggested to us in these days by the word
"progress," is material progress--all that came in with steam; and this
narrow conception vitiates much of our reasoning. It is in this realm
undoubtedly that competition is such a factor of rapid advance; but we
forget that the food of what the best men have ever considered the best
life, is not limited or divisible; but like the light and air is
undiminished how many soever share it. Whatever advance there has been
in the life of the mind and of the higher tastes and sensibilities,
cannot directly be explained by competition, but simply by the quiet
upward working of Nature's inherent forces. We look with scorn at the
unprogressive East, satisfied that there can be no progress, no life
worth living, where there is no rush for dollars. But I think we have
yet to learn the meaning of _ex Oriente lux_.

Much of our immorality and our social evil comes from the fact that
those who have developed the faculties of