But it is especially the freedom of circulation that increases with an advance in civilization, and this advance, like the two preceding, first affects the home or inland circulation. Freedom of competition, the freedom of commerce and industry, technical expressions used to designate freedom in general in the domain of a nation’s economy, is the natural conclusion drawn from the principles of individual independence and of private property. Hence its development is as slow as the development of these, and attains its full growth only in highly cultivated nations, their colonies and dependencies. In very low stages of economic development, the circulation of goods is hampered by the absence of legal security; later, by privileges accorded to a great number of families, corporate bodies, municipalities, classes, etc., and later yet by the mighty guardianship which the state exercises by its power of legislation and even of education.(577) Each one of these epochs constitutes the end of the preceding one, and is milder than it was. Finally comes the period of complete freedom, when every man is permitted to manage his own affairs even with injury to himself, provided the injury is confined to himself. The later times of the Roman Empire are the best illustration of how, with the decline of the conditions which must precede freedom of competition, that freedom itself decays.(578) Freedom of competition unchains all economic forces, good and bad. Hence, when the former preponderate, it hastens the time of a people’s grandeur, as it does their decline where the latter gain the upper hand.(579) We may say of economic freedom what may be said of all other freedom, that the removal of external constraint can be justified and produces the greater good of the greater number only where a stern empire over self takes its place. Without this it would not prevent or avoid idleness, usury or over-population. Freedom must not be simply negative. It must be positive. If on account of the immaturity or over-maturity of a people, there be no sturdy middle class among them, unlimited competition may become what Bazard calls a general _sauve-qui-peut_ (let the devil take the hindmost); what Fourier designates as a _morcellement industriel_, and a _fraude commerciale_; what M. Chevalier denominated “a battle-field on which the little are devoured by the big;” and in such case, as Bodz-Reymond says, the word competition, meaning simply that each one is permitted to run in whatever direction he may see a door open to him, is but another and a new expression for vagabondizing. But here the evil does not lie in too great competition, but in this, that on one side there is too little competition.(580) The opposing principle of competition is always monopoly, that is, as John Stuart Mill says, the taxation of industry in the interest of indolence and even rapacity; and protection against competition is synonymous with a dispensation from the necessity to be as