Competitive Systeivi Amongst Lower Animals 765 



and poor, surfeited and suffering; so they lay a complacent 

 salve to their hearts and consciences. 



The competitive, the analytic system has been tested for 

 millions of years amid millions of animal species up to man 

 himself. It is one of two — and only two — possible means of 

 survival and advance. The other is the cooperative, the 

 social, the synthetic. Amongst animals below man the former 

 has been tested in every possible way, and the competitive 

 groups have surely become lone, few, exterminated; while 

 the latter have increased to ever greater masses of individuals, 

 to ever more ramified species, to higher and higher types of 

 organization. 



For many thousands of years evolving man has been com- 

 paring, experimenting on, and measuring the two systems. 

 Often baffled, defeated, and decimated, he has been seeking 

 slowly but surely for some way that would link him with his 

 fellows, with the universe, and with the great Power — the 

 Godhead of that universe. Would the competitive or the 

 cooperative guide him thither.^ has been his anxious and un- 

 answered query through all the scores of millennia. With 

 ever surer, clearer, more determined decision, the recent cen- 

 turies have been giving him reply. 



Through these past centuries the competitive system has 

 been tested in the most varied manner, on the most gigantic 

 scale, amongst people of diverse origin, by the brainiest men 

 backed by resources that were undreamed of two or three 

 millennia ago when Lao-tsze, Amenhotep IV, Zarathushtra, 

 Plato, Christ, and Paul were proclaiming new doctrines. The 

 thoughtful, tlie laboring, the earnest, the synii)athetic, and 

 the major mass of mankind have discovered that competition 

 has failed and failed signally. 



It has absorbed the land that is the heritage of all by nature, 

 and has used it to enslave, or stunt mentally, or dissipate to 

 less natural centers those who should cultivate and eniov it. 

 It has absorbed the natural products of the soil that each one 

 could once grow or barter, and has made them ])a\vns for gam- 

 bling with, or has — shame to even dream of it — destroyed 



