justifiable,
and to give the fullest scope for every proved ability, intellectual,
moral, and physical. Of course, such approximation to this result, as
we can observe in the present order of things, is very imperfect. Many
of the most obvious evils in the particular system of competition now
adopted, may be summed up in the statement, that the tests according to
which success is awarded, are not so contrived as to secure the success
of the best competitors. Some of them, for example, are calculated to
give an advantage to the superficial and the showy. But that is to say
that they are incompatible with the true principle which they were
intended to embody; and that we should reform our method, not in the
direction of limiting competition, but in the direction of so framing
our system that it may be a genuine application of Carlyle's doctrine.
In other words, in all the professions for which intellectual
excellence is required, the conditions should be such as to give the
best man the best chance, as far as human arrangements can secure that
object. What other rule can be suggested? Competition, in this sense,
means the preservation of the very atmosphere which is necessary to
health; and to denounce it is either to confirm the most selfish and
retrograde principles, or to denounce something which is only called
competition by a confusion of ideas. How easy such a confusion may be,
is obvious when we look at the ordinary language about industrial
competition. We are told that wages are kept down by competition. To
this Mill replied in the passage I have quoted, and, upon his own
theory, at any rate, replied with perfect justice, that they were also
kept up by competition. The common language upon the subject is merely
one instance of the fallacies into which men fall when they personify
an abstraction. Competition becomes a kind of malevolent and
supernatural being, to whose powers no conceivable limits are assigned.
It is supposed to account for any amount of degradation. Yet if, by
multiplying their numbers, workmen increase supply, and so lower the
price of labour, it follows, conversely, by the very same reasoning,
that if they refused to multiply, they would diminish the supply and
raise the price. The force, by its very nature, operates as certainly
in one direction as in the other. If, again, there is competition among
workmen, there is competition among capitalists. In every strike, of
course, workmen apply the p