THE RICH RICHER, THE POOR POORER. 291 



may vary through a wide range, it is possible that the results may 

 vary through a wide scale of degrees. Moreover, the more intense 

 the competition, the greater are the prizes of success and the heavier 

 are the penalties of failure. This is illustrated in the competition of 

 a large city as compared with that of a small one. Competition can 

 no more be done away with than gravitation. Its incidence can be 

 changed. We can adopt as a social policy, " Woe to the successful ! " 

 We can take the prizes away from the successful and give them to 

 the unsuccessful. It seems clear that there would soon be no prizes 

 at all, but that inference is not universally accepted. In any event, it 

 is plain that we have not got rid of competition — i. e., of the struggle 

 for existence and the competition of life. We have only decided that, 

 if we can not all have equally, we will all have nothing. 



Competition does not guarantee results corresponding with merit, 

 because hereditary conditions and good and bad fortune are always 

 intermingled with merit, but competition secures to merit all the 

 chances it can enjoy under circumstances for which none of one's 

 fellow-men are to blame. 



Now, it seems to be believed that although competition produces 

 wide grades of inequality, almsgiving, or forcible repartition of 

 wealth, would not do so. Here we come to the real, great, and mis- 

 chievous fallacy of the social philosophy which is in vogue. Whether 

 there are great extremes of rich and poor in a society is a matter of 

 very little importance. There is no ground for the importance which 

 is attached to that fact in current discussion. It is constantly affirmed 

 in one form or another that, although one man has, in half a lifetime, 

 greatly improved his own position, and can put his children in a far 

 better condition than that in which he started, nevertheless he has not 

 got his fair share in the gains of civilization, because his neighbor, 

 who started where he did, has become a millionaire. John, who is 

 eating a beefsteak off iron-stone china, finds that the taste of it is 

 spoiled because he knows that James is eating pheasants off gold. 

 William, who would have to walk anyway, finds that his feet ache a 

 great deal worse because he learns that Peter has got a horse. Henry, 

 whose yacht is twenty feet long, is sure that there is something wrong 

 in society because Jacob has one a hundred feet long. These are 

 weaknesses of human nature which have always been the fair game of 

 the satirists, but, in our day, they are made the basis of a new philos- 

 ophy and of a redistribution of rights and of property. If the laws 

 and institutions of the society hinder any one from fighting out the 

 battle of life on his or her own behalf to the best of one's ability, 

 especially if they so hinder one to the advantage of another, the field 

 of effort for intelligent and fruitful reform is at once marked out ; but, 

 if examination should reveal no such operation of laws and institu- 

 tions, then the inequality of achievements is no indication of any 

 social disease, but the contrary. 



