September 



890] 



NA TURE 



497 



I believe that the importance of considerations of this kind is 

 habitually underrated in the world at large ; and that the older 

 economists, though fully conscious of them, did not explain with 

 sufficient clearness and iteration the important place which they 

 take in the claims of industrial competition on the gratitude of 

 mankind. 



The chemist in his laboratory can make experiments on his 

 own responsibility : if he had to ask leave from others at each 

 step he would go but slowly, and though the officials of a com- 

 pany may have some freedom to make experiments in detail, yet 

 even as regards these they seldom have a strong incentive to 

 exertion ; and in great matters the freedom of experimenting lies 

 only with those who undertake the responsibility of the business. 



It may indeed be admitted that some kinds of industrial im- 

 provements are getting to depend on the general increase of 

 scientific knowledge rather than on such experiments as can only 

 be made by business men. And this, which is an important fact 

 so far as it goes, may be used as a convenient introduction to the 

 next point that I want to make in the analysis of competition. 

 It is that the motives which induce business men to compete for 

 wealth are not altogether as sordid as the world in general, and 

 I am forced to admit, economists in particular have been wont 

 to assume. 



The chemist or the physicist may happen to make money by 

 his inventions, but that is seldom the chief motive of his work. 

 He wants to earn somehow the means of a cultured life for him- 

 self and his family, but, that being once provided, he spends 

 himself in seeking knowledge partly for its own sake, partly for 

 the good that it may do to others, and last, and often not least, 

 for the honour it may do himself. His discoveries become col- 

 lective property as soon as they are made, and altogether he 

 would not be a very bad citizen of Utopia just as he is. For it 

 would be a great mistake to suppose that the constructors of 

 Utopias from the time of Plato downwards have proposed to 

 abolish competition. On the contrary, they have always taken 

 for granted that a desire to do good for its own sake will need 

 to be supplemented by emulation or competition for the appro- 

 bation of others. 



But business men are very much of the same nature as scientific 

 men ; they have the same " instincts of the chase," and many of 

 them have the same power of being stimulated to great and even 

 feverish exertions by emulations that are not sordid or ignoble. 

 This part of their nature has however been confused with and 

 thrown into the shade by their desire to make money. The chief 

 reason why the scientific man does not care much for money is 

 that in scientific work the earning of much money is no proof 

 of excellence, but sometimes rather the reverse. On the other 

 hand, in business a man's money-earning power, though not an 

 accurate test of the real value to the world of what he has done, 

 is yet often the best available. It is that test which most of 



I those, for whose opinion he cares, believe to be more trustworthy 

 than the highly-coloured reports the world hears from time to 

 time of the benefits which it is just going to derive from a new 

 invention or plan of organizing that is just going to revolutionize 

 a branch of industry. And so all the best business men want to 

 get money, but many of them do not care about it much for its 

 own sake ; they want it chiefly as the most convincing proof to 

 themselves and others that they have succeeded. 



These are the very men for whom the older economists were 

 most eager to claim freedom of competition as needful to evoke 

 them to do fully their high work for the world. But they seem 

 to have made the error of running together and treating as 

 though they were one, two different positions. 



The first is that industrial progress depends on our getting the 

 right men into the right places and giving them a free hand, and 

 sufficient incitement to exert themselves to the utmost. And the 

 second position is that nothing less than the enormous fortunes 

 which successful men now make and retain would suffice for that 

 purpose. This last position seems to be untenable. 



The present extreme inequaliies of wealth tend in many ways 

 to prevent human faculties from being turned to their best 

 account. A good and varied education, freely prolonged to those 

 children of the working classes who showed the power and the 

 will to use it well, an abundance of open-air recreation even in 

 lai^e towns, and other requisites of a wholesome life — such 

 things as these might, most of us are inclined to think, be 

 supplied by taxes levied on the rich, without seriously checking 

 the accumulation of material capital ; and with the effect of in- 

 creasing rather than diminishing the services which competition 

 renders to society by tending to put the ablest men into the most I 



important posts, the next ablest into the next most important, 

 and so on, and by giving to those in each grade freedom sufficient 

 or the full exercise of their faculties. 



It is quite true that where any class of workers have less than 

 the necessaries for efficiency, an increase of income acts directly 

 on their power of work. But when they already have those 

 necessaries, the gain to production from a further increase of 

 their income depends chiefly on the addition that it makes, not 

 to their power of working, but to their will to exert themselves. 

 And all history shows that a man will exert himself nearly as 

 much to secure a small rise in income as a large one, provided 

 he knows beforehand what he stands to gain, and is in no fear of 

 having the expected fruits of his exertions taken away from him 

 by arbitrary spoliation. If there were any fear of that he would 

 not do his best ; but if the conditions of the country were such 

 that a moderate income gave as good a social position as a large 

 one does now ; if to have earned a moderate income were a 

 strong presumptive proof that a man had surpassed able rivals in 

 the attempt to do a difficult thing well, then the hope of earning 

 such an income would offer to all but the most sordid natures, 

 inducements almost as strong as they are no a- when there is an 

 equal hope of earning a large one. 



On all this class of questions modern economists are inclined 

 to go a little way with the socialists. But all socialist schemes, 

 and especially those which are directly or indirectly of German 

 origin, seem to be vitiated by want of attention to the analysis 

 which the economists of the modern age have made of the 

 functions of the undertaker of business enterprises. They seem 

 to think too much of competition as the exploiting of labour by 

 capital, of the poor by the wealthy, and too little of it as the 

 constant experiment by the able>t men for their several tasks, 

 each trying to discover a new way in which to attain some 

 important end. They still retain the language of the older 

 economists, in which the employer, or undertaker, and the 

 capitalist are spoken of, as though they were, for all practical 

 purposes, the same people. The organ of the German school of 

 English socialists prints frequently in thick type the question, 

 "Is there one single useful or necessary duty performed by the 

 capitalist to day which the people organized could not perform 

 for themselves ?" It would be just as reasonable to ask if there 

 is a single victory to which Julius Caesar or Napoleon conducted 

 their troops, which the troops properly organized could not have 

 equally well won for themselves ; or whether there is a single 

 thing written by Shakespeare which could not have been equally 

 well written by any one else who, as Charles Lamb said, happened 

 to '* have the mind to do it." It is quite true that many business 

 men earn large incomes by routine work. It is just in these 

 cases that Co-operation can dispense with middlemen and even 

 employers. But the German socialists have been bitter foes of 

 Co-operation j though this antagonism is less than it was. 



The world owes much to the socialists, as it does to every set 

 of enthusiasts among whom there are honest men ; and many a 

 generous heart has been made more generous by reading their 

 poetic aspirations. But before their writings can be regarded as 

 serious contributions to economic science, they must make more 

 careful and exact analysis of the good and the evil of com- 

 petition ; and they must suggest some reasonably efficient sub- 

 stitute for that freedom which our present system offers to 

 constructive genius to work its way to the light, and to prove its 

 existence by attempting difficult tasks on its own responsibility, 

 and succeeding in them. For those who have done most for the 

 world have seldom been those whom their neighbours would 

 have picked out as likely for the work. They must not, as even 

 Mr. Bellamy and other American socialists do, in spite of their 

 strong protestations to the contrary, assume implicitly a complete 

 change of human nature ; and propound schemes which would 

 much diminish the aggregate production, but which they represent 

 as enabling every family to attain an amount of material well- 

 being which would be out of reach of the aggregate income if 

 England or America were divided out equally among the 

 population. 



But though the socialists have ascribed to the virtues inherent 

 in the human breast, and to the regulating force of public 

 opinion, a much greater capacity for doing the energizing work 

 of competition than they seem really to have ; yet, unquestionably, 

 the economists of to-day do go beyond those of earlier genera- 

 tions in believing that the desire of men for the approval of their 

 own conscience, and the esteem of others, is an economic force 

 of the first order of importance, and that its strength is steadily^ 

 increasing with the increase and the diffusion of koowledge, and 



NO. 



1090, VOL. 42] 



