nt wholly to one purveyor or one system of
management--as in the Postal Service, or the Army and Navy. Sometimes it
is clearly better to leave the matter open to competition. Nobody, for
instance, would propose to do with only one minstrel, and seal the lips
of all poets but the Poet Laureate. Sometimes, as in the case of the
organized professions and the liquor trade, a strictly regulated system
of competition has been considered best. No doubt the tendency at the
present time is setting strongly against competition and towards more
unified and more closely organized systems of doing business. But it is
important to make quite clear that there is nothing immoral or
anti-social about the fact of competition itself, and nothing
inconsistent with the idea of service and co-operation which should
underlie all social and economic activity. It is not competition itself,
as people often wrongly think, which is the evil, but the shallow and
selfish motives and the ruthless trampling down of the weak that are too
often associated with it. When we condemn the maxim 'the Devil take the
hindmost', it is not because we think we ought to treat the hindmost as
though he were the foremost--to buy cracked jars or patronize incapable
minstrels. It is because we feel that there is a wrong standard of
reward among those who have pushed to the front, and that the community
as a whole cannot ignore its responsibility towards its less fortunate
and capable members.

It is, indeed, quite impossible to abolish competition for the patronage
of the household without subjecting its members to tyranny or tying them
down to an intolerable uniformity--forcing them to suppress their own
temporary likes or dislikes and to go on taking in the same stuff in the
same quantities world without end. For the most serious and permanent
competition is not that between rival purveyors of the same goods,
between potter and potter and minstrel and minstrel, but between one
set of goods and another: between the potter and the blacksmith, the
minstrel and the painter. If we abolished competition permanently
between the British railways we could not make sure that the public
would always use them as it does now. People would still be at liberty
to walk or to drive or to bicycle or to fly, or, at the very worst, to
stay at home. Competition, as every business man knows, sometimes arises
from the most unexpected quarters. The picture-house and the bicycle
have damaged