of the word ‹value›; if you conclude from this that I have no longer faith in Political Economy and Political Economists, I can only protest, and appeal to the very title of the present volume. [p288] X. COMPETITION. There is not in the whole vocabulary of Political Economy a word which has roused the fury of modern reformers so much as the word ‹Competition›, which, in order to render it the more odious, they never fail to couple with the epithet ‹anarchical›. What is the meaning of ‹anarchical competition›? I really don’t know. What could we substitute for it? I am equally ignorant. I hear people, indeed, calling out ‹Organization! Association!› What does that mean? Let us come to an understanding, once for all. I desire to know what sort of authority these writers intend to exercise over me, and all other living men; for I acknowledge only one species of authority, that of reason, if indeed they have it on their side. Is it their wish then to deprive me of the right of exercising my judgment on what concerns my own subsistence? Is their object to take from me the power of comparing the services which I render with those which I receive? Do they mean that I should act under the influence of restraint, exerted over me by them and not by my own intelligence? If they leave me my liberty, Competition remains. If they deprive me of freedom, I am their slave. Association will be ‹free and voluntary›, they say. Be it so. But then each group of associates will, as regards all other groups, be just what individuals now are in relation to each other, and we shall still have ‹Competition›. The association will be ‹integral›. A good joke truly. What! Anarchical Competition is now desolating society, and we must wait for a remedy, until, by dint of your persuasion, all the nations of the earth—Frenchmen, Englishmen, Chinese, Japanese, Caffres, Hottentots, Laplanders, Cossacks, Patagonians—make up their minds to unite in one of the forms of association which you have devised? Why, this is just to avow that competition is indestructible; and will you venture to say that a phenomenon which [p289] is indestructible, and consequently providential, can be mischievous?