We have therefore to inquire whether any principle can be suggested
which will effect the desired end, and which will yet really exclude
competition. The popular suggestion is that the remedy lies in
suppressing competition by equalising the prizes. If no prizes are to
be won, there will so far be less reason for competing. Enough may be
provided for all by simply taking something from those who have too
much. Now, I may probably assume that we all agree in approving the
contemplated end--a greater equality of wealth, and especially an
elevation of the lower classes to a higher position in the scale of
comfort. Every social reformer, whatever his particular creed, would
probably agree that some of us are too rich, and that a great many are
too poor. But we still have to ask, in what sense it is conceivable
that a real suppression of competition can contribute to the desired
end. It is obvious that when we denounce competition we often mean not
that it is to be abolished, but that it is to be regulated and limited
in its application. So, for example, people sometimes speak as if
competition were the antithesis to co-operation. But I need hardly say
that individualists, as well as their opponents, may legitimately sing
the praises of co-operation. Nobody was more forward than Mill, for
example, and Mill's followers, in advocating the principles of the
early co-operative societies. He and they rejoiced to believe that the
co-operative societies had revealed unsuspected virtues and capacities
in the class from which they sprang; that they had done much to raise
the standard of life and to extend sympathy and human relations among
previously disconnected units of society. But it is, of course, equally
obvious that they have grown up in a society which supposes free
competition in every part of its industrial system; that co-operative
societies, so far as the outside world is concerned, have to buy in the
cheapest and sell in the dearest market; that the rate of wages of
their members is still fixed by competition; and that they encourage
habits of saving and forethought which presuppose that each man is to
have private ends of his own. In what sense, then, can co-operation
ever be regarded as really opposed to competition? Competition may
exist among groups of men just as much as among individuals: a state of
war is not less a state of war if it is carried on by regiments and
armies, instead of by mere chaotic struggles in wh