fe, and the weaker co-operate in
subordination, they waive and compromise the conflict and use their
conjoint strength against a common rival.

Competition is a necessary condition of progressive life. I do not
know if so far I have made that belief sufficiently clear in these
confessions. Perhaps in my anxiety to convey my idea of a human
synthesis I have not sufficiently insisted upon the part played by
competition in that synthesis. But the implications of the view that I
have set forth are fairly plain. Every individual, I have stated, is
an experiment for the synthesis of the species, and upon that idea my
system of conduct so far as it is a system is built. Manifestly
the individual's function is either self-development, service and
reproduction, or failure and an end.

With moral and intellectual development the desire to serve and
participate in a collective purpose arises to control the blind and
passionate impulse to survival and reproduction that the struggle for
life has given us, but it does not abolish the fact of selection, of
competition. I contemplate no end of competition. But for competition
that is passionate, egoistic and limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful,
I desire to see competition that is controlled and fair-minded and
devoted, men and women doing their utmost with themselves and making
their utmost contribution to the specific accumulation, but in the end
content to abide by a verdict.

The whole development of civilization, it seems to me, consists in the
development of adequate tests of survival and of an intellectual and
moral atmosphere about those tests so that they shall be neither cruel
nor wasteful. If the test is not to be 'are you strong enough to kill
everyone you do not like?' that will only be because it will ask still
more comprehensively and with regard to a multitude of qualities other
than brute killing power, 'are you adding worthily to the synthesis by
existence and survival?'

I am very clear in my mind on this perpetual need of competition. I
admit that upon that turns the practicability of all the great series of
organizing schemes that are called Socialism. The Socialist scheme must
show a system in which predominance and reproduction are correlated with
the quality and amount of an individual's social contribution, and so
far I acknowledge it is only in the most general terms that this can be
claimed as done. We Socialists have to work out all these questions far