TO THE POOR. 253 



and forlorn army of the failures, and paupers, and crimi- 

 nals-, which it has in great measure produced. 



And yet this regime of feverish competition, with all 

 its evils and disastrous chances for the lower classes, 

 who perish like flies beneath its fluctuations and panics, 

 and with all its odious and vulgar accompaniments, the 

 pushing, struggling, and trampling on the fallen, as they 

 show themselves in the better classes ; this wretched and 

 evil system of individualism, worse than the feudalism 

 which it followed, where the vassal at least shared the 

 bread as well as the fortune of his lord, and where 

 pauperism did not exist ; this system is, it seems, to be 

 consecrated in the name of Science, and pronounced an 

 eternal and unalterable fact and law of social existence. 

 Competition, the ordeal of battle, the survival of the 

 strong, is the universal law of all life, evolution-science 

 affirms. Competition finds the fit within the several 

 callings, is the spur to all invention and excellence, 

 regulates wages, profits, and rents, and, according to 

 orthodox political economy, competition though it con- 

 fessedly depresses wages to Ricardo's pitiless minimum 

 wherever labourers compete against each other and 

 masters take advantage of it is yet an eternal fact, the 

 most necessary condition of social and national progress. 



But this very competitive and much-lauded regime 

 which certain writers on economic and sociological sub- 

 jects would stereotype as necessary and eternal law, 

 is an essentially modern as well as an evidently modi- 

 fiable thing; a stage in the course of evolution, if the 

 evolutionist wishes ; a passing phase of our civilization, 

 which began, as recent research discloses, in a form of 

 communism, which has passed through a series of con- 

 tinuous changes to unlimited individualism, and which no 

 less clearly in certain directions manifests a tendency to 



