only honest means in
the struggle, are qualities which can never lose their value, and which
are not the less valuable because in the first instance they are most
profitable to their possessors. Nothing which tends to weaken such
motives can be good; but while they preserve their intensity, they
necessarily imply the existence of competition in some form or other.

It is equally clear that competition by itself is not a sufficient
panacea. Whenever we take an abstract quality, personify it by the help
of capital letters, and lay it down as the one principle of a complex
system, we generally blunder. Competition is as far as possible from
being the solitary condition of a healthy society. It must be not only
a competition for worthy ends by honourable means, but should be a
competition so regulated that the reward may bear some proportion to
the merit. Monopoly is an evil in so far as it means an exclusive
possession of some advantages or privileges, especially when they are
given by the accidents of birth or position. It is something if they
are given to the best and the ablest; but the evil still remains if
even the best and ablest are rewarded by a position which cramps the
energies and lowers the necessity of others. Competition is only
desirable in so far as it is a process by which the useful qualities
are encouraged by an adequate, and not more than an adequate, stimulus;
and in which, therefore, there is not involved the degradation and the
misery on the one side, the excessive reward on the other, of the
unsuccessful and the successful in the struggle. Competition,
therefore, we might say, could be unequivocally beneficial only in an
ideal society; in a state in which we might unreservedly devote
ourselves to making the best of our abilities and accepting the
consequent results, without the painful sense in the background that
others were being sacrificed and debased; crushed because they had less
luck in the struggle, and were, perhaps, only less deserving in some
degree than ourselves. So long as we are still far enough from having
realised any such state; so long as we feel, and cannot but feel, that
the distribution of rewards is so much at the mercy of chance, and so
often goes to qualities which, in an ideal state, would deserve rather
reprobation than applause, we can only aim at better things. We can do
what in us lies to level some inequalities, to work, so far as our
opportunities enable us, in the cau