“Let me here again remind you that it is not _competition_, like some of your economists try to make your people believe, but monopoly which makes your earth such a cruel, poor world to live in. _Profit_ is one form of monopoly in trade and commerce. You will notice that in our social and industrial world there is a keen competition everywhere. One community, family and individual endeavor to do better and more work in the same time than another. But a competitor is always a laborer, winning his race by his superior merit. He always earns his own living, besides giving the benefit of his superior merit to the world at large. “But notice the difference in the profit-taker. He receives something for which he does nothing, and the person who pays him the profit, pays for something for which he receives nothing. For this reason a profit-taker may grow rich by living an idle life, by being a social parasite, like all your profit-takers are as such. He simply appropriates what others have already earned. A competitor never lives from the labor of another. The community which makes the best and cheapest shoes, sells the most, and this is just what it should be, for every one should be allowed to buy as cheap as he can. Those competing communities in the shoe business, of which there are, of course many, must either devise means of making better and cheaper shoes, or they must engage in other business for which they are better adapted. Under this keen competition every community will naturally drift into those occupations for which it is best adapted and in which it is most proficient. Just as it is with the community, so it is with the family and with the individual. The profit-taker endeavors to achieve his victory by monopolistically tearing down his neighbor, while under freedom a competitor relies on the superiority of his own merits without interfering with the race of his neighbor. Competition is the only power of which we know that can gently shift every person, family, community, etc., into that social and industrial sphere for which each is best adapted. A competitor, under freedom, is never robbed of what he produces; he always possesses at least as much wealth as he would if he were the only inhabitant of a world. Monopoly, in its various forms, is the thief and robber. “Let us in a few words compare your commercial and mercantile system with ours, not with a view of fault-finding, not with a view of casting reflections, but with a view of instruction. We all need all the information we can get; if it is not in one thing it is in another. Nobody knows it all. Very likely there is much more that we do not know than the little we do know. Perhaps there is no better evidence of mental narrowness than our ostentatious pretention of knowing it all. With this view in mind let us proceed.