clares his utter dissent from their declamations
against competition. "They forget," he says, "that where competition is
not, monopoly is; and that monopoly, in all its forms, is the taxation
of the industrious for the support of indolence, if not of plunder."
That suggests my question: If competition is bad, what is good? What is
the alternative to competition? Is it, as Mill says, monopoly, or is
any third choice possible? If it is monopoly, do you defend monopoly,
or only monopoly in some special cases? I opened, not long ago, an old
book of caricatures, in which the revolutionary leader is carrying a
banner with the double inscription, "No monopoly! No competition!" The
implied challenge--how can you abolish both?--seemed to me to require a
plain answer. Directly afterwards I then took up the newspaper, and
read the report of an address upon the prize-day of a school. The
speaker dwelt in the usual terms upon the remorseless and crushing
competition of the present day, which he mentioned as an incitement to
every boy to get a good training for the struggle. The moral was
excellent; but it seemed to me curious that the speaker should be
denouncing competition in the very same breath with proofs of its
influence in encouraging education. When I was a lad, a clever boy and
a stupid boy had an equal chance of getting an appointment to a public
office. The merit which won a place might be relationship to a public
official, or perhaps to a gentleman who had an influence in the
constituency of the official. The system was a partial survival of the
good old days in which, according to Sam Weller, the young nobleman got
a position because his mother's uncle's wife's grandfather had once
lighted the King's pipe. The nobleman, I need hardly add, considered
this as an illustration of the pleasant belief, "Whatever is, is
right". As we had ceased to accept that opinion in politics, offices
were soon afterwards thrown open to competition, with the general
impression that we were doing justice and opening a career to merit.
That the resulting system has grave defects is, I think, quite
undeniable; but so far as it has succeeded in determining that the men
should be selected for public duty, for their fitness, and for nothing
else, it is surely a step in advance which no one would now propose to
retrace. And yet it was simply a substitution of competition for
monopoly. As it comes into wider operation, some of us begin to cry out
ag