898 
REPORT—1890, 
Section F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION—Professor ALFRED Marsuatt, M.A., F.S.S. 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4. 
The Presipent delivered the following Address :— 
TABLE OF 
§ 1. The aim of this paper is to indi- 
cate some changes in the general attitude 
of economists towards competition. 
2. The earlier economists did not 
sufficiently distinguish the effects of Pro- 
tection in old and new countries. The 
difficulties of a pioneer manufacturer. 
§ 3. The action of the Laws of In- 
creasing and of Diminishing Returns 
intensifies the evils of Protection in Eng- 
land, but lessens them in America. 
§ 4. The balance of advantage appears 
now, at all events, to be against Protec- 
tion, even in America. 
§ 5. But the valid arguments against 
it have lost much of their force by being 
associated with weak arguments. 
§ 6. We pass to competition and 
combination in domestic trade. Con- 
trast between England and America. 
§ 7. The progress of Trusts in Ame- 
rica so far has been less solid than is 
commonly supposed. 
§ 8. They are, however, learning the 
wisdom of a moderate policy; and this, 
it is claimed, will give them great power. 
§ 9. After they have once made a 
permanent pool of their gains, they are 
very apt to drift towards complete con- 
solidation. 
§ 10. The danger of regarding the 
action of trade combinations of the looser 
sort as in restraint of competition, while 
similar actions on the part of individual 
firms are treated as legitimate forms of 
competition. 
§ 11. English and American econo- 
mists are facing the fact that in some 
industries competition fails to be an 
efficient regulator. They wish generally 
for an extension of State control, and, in 
CONTENTS. 
some cases, of State ownership, but not 
of State management. 
§ 12. Passing to industries which do 
not from their nature exclude efficient 
competition, we mustallow some validity 
to the claim that large combinations tend 
to diminish the waste involved in older 
methods of bargaining; but not, so far 
as is yet shown, to the claim that they 
make industry as a whole more stable 
and constant. 
§ 13. Trade combinations have some 
advantages in availing themselves of 
such economies of production on a large 
scale as are already known. 
§ 14. But they tend to check the 
growth of nearly all inventions and im- 
provements except those which result 
directly from the progress of physical 
science. 
§ 15. This last class is, indeed, of 
growing importance, and results chiefly 
from work done for other motives than 
the desire for pecuniary gain. And 
similar motives play a larger part than 
is commonly supposed in calling forth 
the best energies of business men. 
§ 16. The services of free competi- 
tion in putting the ablest men into the 
most important posts are of the highest 
value to society ; but they do not depend, 
as some economists have assumed, on the 
maintenance of those extreme rights of 
property which tend to augment the 
inequalities of wealth. 
§ 17. The Socialists have done good 
by insisting that the desire for pecuniary 
gain is not the only effective motive of 
business work; but they underrated the 
difficulty of business management. 
§18. The growing importance of 
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