is such as to place them at a disadvantage, retrogression, not
progress, is the outcome. The higher types of character, no less than
the higher organic forms, presuppose external conditions favorable to
their development. Competition is merely the means through which
conformity to these external conditions is enforced. It eliminates alike
that which is better than the environment and that which is worse. It is
indifferent to good or bad, to high or low. It simply picks out,
preserves and perpetuates those types best suited to environing
conditions. Both progress and retrogression are a process of adaptation,
and their cause must be sought, not in the principle of competition
itself, but in the general external conditions to which it enforces
conformity. Success, then, is a matter of adaptation to the environment,
or the power to use it for individual ends--not the power to improve and
enrich it. The power to take from, is nature's sole test of fitness to
live; but the power to enrich is a higher test, and one which society
must enforce through appropriate legislation.

Laws, institutions and methods of trade which make it possible for the
individual to take from more than he adds to the general resources of
society tend inevitably toward general social deterioration. Competition
is wholesome only when all our social arrangements are such as to
discourage and repress all individual activities not in harmony with the
general interests of society. This is the point of view from which all
social and industrial questions must be studied. The problem which
democracy has to solve is the problem of so organizing the environment
as to assure progress through the success and survival of the best.

[Footnote 1: Sebohm, English Village Community, Ch. III; Traill, Social
England, Vol. I, p. 240; Ashley, English Economic History, Vol. I, p.
17.]

[Footnote 2: Lowell, Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, Vol.
I, Ch. I; Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, p. 265.]

[Footnote 3: Work and Wages, p. 398.]

[Footnote 4: Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution,
Vol. I, p. 300.]

[Footnote 5: Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution,
Vol. I, p. 301.]

[Footnote 6: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and
Virginia.]

[Footnote 7: Delaware, Maryland and North Carolina.]

[Footnote 8: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Maryland.]

[Footnote 9: Delaware, New Yor