ear that even this
plan requires that the State should do very much. Under an inert
government the industrial system would suffer irreparably.

The thing first to be rescued is competition--meaning that healthful
rivalry between different producers which has always been the guaranty
of technical progress. That such progress has gone on with bewildering
rapidity since the invention of the steam engine is nowhere denied; and
neither is it denied that competition of the normal kind--the effort of
rivals to excel in productive processes--has caused it. It has
multiplied the product of labor here tenfold, there, twentyfold, and
elsewhere a hundredfold and more.

This increased power to produce has rescued us from an appalling evil.
Without it, such a crowding of population as some countries have
experienced would have carried their peoples to and below the
starvation level. Machinery now enables us to live; and if
world-crowding were to go on in the future as it has done, and the
technical progress should cease, many of us could not live. Poverty
would increase till its cruelest effects would be realized and lives
enough would be crushed out to enable the survivors to get a living. Of
all conditions of human happiness, the one which is most underestimated
is progress in power to produce. Hardly any of those who would
revolutionize the industrial State, and not all of those who would
reform it, have any conception of the importance of this progress. It
is the _sine qua non_ of any hopeful outlook for the future of mankind.

I am to speak, however, of _justice_ in the business relations of life,
and it might seem that this shut out the mere question of general
prosperity. The most obvious issue between different social classes
concerns the division of whatever income exists. Whatever there is, be
it large or small, may be divided rightly or wrongly; but I am not able
to see that the mere division of it exhausts the application of the
principle of justice. While it is clearly wrong for one party to
plunder another, it is almost as clearly wrong for one party to reduce
the general income and so, in a sense, rob everybody. A party that
should systematically hinder production and reduce its fruits would rob
a myriad of honest laborers who are ill prepared to stand this loss and
have a perfect right to be protected from it.

Every man, woman, and child has a right to demand that the powers that
be remove hindrances in the way o