tends to raise it in others, and eventually in all directions, and while this may not increase the individual's power of production directly, it may do so indirectly, by raising the scale of intelligence, and creating new desires, particularly for those immaterial products which it is the peculiarity of a high civilization to furnish in increased proportion as compared with the elementary and material utilities. We do not always class these as wealth, but they are, nevertheless, some of its highest forms, and are important factors in advancing civilization.
But let us now suppose that the standard of living is lowered, through a succession of bad harvests and bad years, or through the importation, in numbers large enough to seriously affect the labor market, of laborers from outside, with a much lower standard of living, and who can work for much lower wages, or from both causes combined, or from many others, such as bad laws, lack of sympathy for our fellow-men, etc., and what will be the result?
In the struggle for existence, the weaker go to the wall, and are killed and removed from further participation in the conflict. The fittest only survive, and the result of the conflict is to leave them more capable of taking care of themselves. But this is not a necessary outcome of the struggle for subsistence, unless it should be carried on long enough to become a veritable struggle for existence, which rarely occurs. On the contrary, men are not killed and thus got rid of as further competitors. They are made miserable, less fit to work, and incapable of that mobility which, if present, enables the social organism to so distribute the blows that fall upon it as to cause it the least trouble, and to render recuperation easier. "When the mobility of labor becomes in a high degree impaired, the reparative and restorative forces do not act at all." On the contrary, "industrial injuries, once suffered, tend to remain."[1] The constitution of society becomes impaired. The standard of living for large masses of the people is lowered, but competition is not thereby destroyed; it is more frequently intensified. Unlike the struggle for existence among animals, the economically and socially fit do not kill off the unfit, and so have the field to themselves.
Do not understand me as condemning competition altogether. Its advantages are many and great. Material progress would have been impossible without it, and under certain conditions it works out a moral result which it would be difficult to bring about by any other social force. But, tried by the test of social well-being, competition is shown to have certain inherent limitations which we must ever keep in mind. It is only by studying economics in close relation to ethics that we can do this, and it is
- ↑ "Political Economy," Walker, p. 275.
