622 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



not hesitated to dilute and falsify the drugs employed to assuage 

 pain and heal the sick and wounded. With this not only the 

 intensity of modern competition but the width of its area has had 

 something to do. One of the strongest moral checks in human 

 nature is sympathy with suffering ; but if aggravation of suffering 

 be remote in place, uncertain in time, and unpublished, conscience 

 is apt to slumber. A druggist to-day receives from scores of fac- 

 tories hundreds of preparations, concerning the purity of which 

 he knows little or nothing. He dispenses them not to neighbors, 

 but to customers, who, from the necessities of the case, must be 

 strangers to him. 



Not only in adulteration, but in other evils developed by com- 

 petition, is the meanest man in a trade the lawgiver in that trade. 

 A manufacturer or miner imports cheap Italian and Hungarian 

 labor, thereby reducing the standard of living among his other 

 work-people to the Italian and Hungarian level, and obliging his 

 competitors to follow his example. A few firms who introduced 

 child-labor into the manufacture of garments are responsible for 

 the shrinkage in wages which of late years has steadily overtaken 

 the entire seamstress class. 



Adam Smith tells us that one of the elements of price is the 

 higgling of the market — a pregnant observation concerning one 

 of the grievous burdens of competition. We hear much about 

 the frauds perpetrated by those who make and sell goods — we 

 hear little concerning the frauds committed by those who buy ; 

 yet buyers and sellers are made of the same clay, and buyers not 

 seldom grudge to pay a fair profit to the men who supply them. 

 To illustrate : Let us suppose the firm of Robinson & Co. to be 

 makers of thermometers, on which they set prices as just to their 

 customers as to themselves. They are accustomed to sell a tenth 

 part of their output to a certain New-Yorker. He goes to them 

 one day and says that, unless they reduce their prices five per 

 cent, he will cease to deal with them. Although at a deduction 

 from the profit fairly their due, they comply, simply because to 

 refuse will result in larger loss than to submit. What one cus- 

 tomer has done others may do, so that "higgling" may for a 

 longer or shorter time force capable and industrious men to work 

 without wages. Competition may be dreaded for just as well 

 as for interested motives. A new rival may inflict severe loss 

 through overestimating the business field which he enters ; 

 through cutting the price of a staple below cost, and making it 

 what is called a " leader " ; or through downright dishonesty and 

 recklessness. 



One of the remarkable developments of modern competition is 

 in the matter of its costly and pervasive methods of solicitation. 

 This, in the case of the commercial-traveling system, has had 



