ithout some
form of competition. Nothing, as a recent writer suggests,--ironically,
perhaps,--could be easier than to secure an abolition of competition.
You have only to do two things: to draw a "ring-fence" round your
society, and then to proportion the members within the fence to the
supplies. The remark suggests the difficulty. A ring-fence, for
example, round London or Manchester would mean the starvation of
millions in a month; or, if round England, the ruin of English
commerce, the enormous rise in the cost of the poor man's food, and the
abolition of all his little luxuries. But, if you include even a
population as large as London, what you have next to do is to drill
some millions of people--vast numbers of them poor, reckless, ignorant,
sensual, and selfish--to regulate their whole mode of life by a given
code, and refrain from all the pleasures which they most appreciate.
The task is a big one, and not the less if you have also to undertake
that everybody, whatever his personal qualities, shall have enough to
lead a comfortable life. I do not suppose, however, that any rational
Socialist would accept that programme of isolation. He would hold that,
in his Utopia, we can do more efficiently all that is done under a
system which he regards as wasteful and unjust. The existing machinery,
whatever else may be said of it, does, in fact, tend to weld the whole
world more and more into a single industrial organism. English workmen
are labouring to satisfy the wants of other human beings in every
quarter of the world; while Chinese, and Africans, and Europeans, and
Americans are also labouring to satisfy theirs. This vast and almost
inconceivably complex machinery has grown up in the main unconsciously,
or, at least, with a very imperfect anticipation of the ultimate
results, by the independent efforts of innumerable inventors, and
speculators, and merchants, and manufacturers, each of them intent, as
a rule, only upon his own immediate profits and the interests of the
little circle with which he is in immediate contact. The theory is not,
I suppose, that this gigantic system of mutual interdependence should
be abolished or restricted, but that it should be carried on
consciously, with definite and intelligible purpose, and in such a way
as to promote the interests of every fraction of society. The whole
organism should resemble one worked by a single brain, instead of
representing the resultant of a multitude of dist