TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 899 
public opinion as an economic force, § 19. The difficulties of public 
especially in cases in which effective | opinion, and the importance of its being 
competition is impossible, or has been | trained for its new responsibilities. 
displaced by combinations. § 20. Conclusion. 
Some Aspects of Competition. 
§ 1. I unpERSTAND that the function of an Opening Address to a section of this 
Association is to give an account of the advances made in some part of the field of 
study with which that section is specially concerned. The part of our field to 
which I would direct your attention to-day is the action of competition in trade 
and commerce. We cannot, in the short space of time allotted to us, make an 
adequate study of the progress that has been made even in this part of our field; 
but we may be able to go some way towards ascertaining the character of the 
changes that are going on in our own time in the mode of action of competition, 
and in the attitude of economists towards it. 
I do not now speak of changes in the moral sentiments of economists with 
regard to competition—though these, also, are significant in their way—but of 
changes in their mental attitude towards it, and in the way in which they analyse 
and reason about its methods of action. Of these changes, the most conspicuous 
and important is the abandonment of general propositions and dogmas in favour of 
processes of analysis and reasoning, carefully worked out, and held ready for 
application to the special circumstances of particular problems relating to different 
countries and different ages, to different races and different classes of industry. 
This movement may, perhaps, best be regarded as a passing onward from that 
early stage in the development of scientific method, in which the operations of Nature 
are represented as conventionally simplified for the purpose of enabling them to be 
‘described in short and easy sentences, to that higher stage in which they are 
studied more carefully, and represented more nearly as they are, even at the expense 
of some loss of simplicity and definiteness, and even apparent lucidity. To put 
the same thing in more familiar words, the English economists of fifty years ago 
were gratified, rather than otherwise, when some faithful henchman, or hench- 
woman, undertook to set forth their doctrines in the form of a catechism or creed ; 
and the economists of to-day abhor creeds and catechisms. Such things are now 
left for the Socialists. 
It has, indeed, been an unfortunate thing for the reputation of the older 
economists, that many of the conditions of England at the beginning of this 
century were exceptional, some being transitional, and others, eyen at the time,” 
peculiar to England. Their knowledge of facts was, on the average, probably 
quite as thorough as that of the leading economists of England or Germany 
to-day, though their range was narrow. Their thoroughness was their own, the 
narrowness of their range belonged to their age; and though each of them knew a 
great deal, their ageregate knowledge was not much greater than that of any one 
of them, because there were so few of them, and they were so very well agreed. 
In these matters we economists of to-day have the advantage over them. 
Their agreement with one another made them confident; the want of a strong 
opposition made therm dogmatic; the necessity of making themselves intelligible to 
the multitude made them suppress even such conditioning and qualifying clauses as 
they had in their own minds: and thus, although their doctrines contained more 
that was true, and new, and important than those promulgated by almost any other 
set of men that have ever lived—doctrines for .which they will be gratefully 
remembered as long as the history of our century retains any interest—yet, still, 
these doctrines were so narrow and inelastic that, when they were applied under 
conditions of time and place different from those in which they had their origin, 
their faults became obvious and created a reaction azainst them. 
Perhaps the greatest economic danger of our age is that this reaction may be 
carried too far, and that the great truths which lie embedded in their too large 
utterances may be neglected because they are not new, and men are a little tired 
of them, and because they are associated with much that is not true, and which 
