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 the brewer and the publican. Similarly the motor-car and the golf links have spoilt the trade in the fine china ornaments such as used to be common in expensively furnished drawing-rooms. People sit less in their rooms, so spend less on decorating them. The members of the household always retain ultimate control over their economic life, if they care to exercise it. 'Whoso has sixpence,' as Carlyle said, 'is sovereign (to the length of sixpence), over all men; commands Cooks to feed him, Philosophers to teach him, Kings to mount guard over him,'--to the length of sixpence. Passive resistance and the boycott are always open to the public in the last resort against any of their servants who has abused the powers of his position. A good instance of this occurred in the events which led to the so-called Tobacco riots in Milan in 1848. The Austrians thought they could force the Italians in their Lombard provinces to pay for a government they hated by putting a heavy tax on tobacco. But the Italians, with more self-control than we have shown in the present war, with one accord gave up smoking. Here was a plain competition between a monopoly and the consumer, between tobacco and patriotism: between a united household and an unpopular servant: and the household won, as it always can unless its members are incapable of combined action or have been deprived by governmental tyranny of all power to associate and to organize.