This, indeed, suggests another and a highly important question--the question, namely, whether, in our present social state, his reward may not be excessive, and won at too great a cost to his rivals. And, without going into other questions involved, I will try to say a little, in conclusion, upon this, which is certainly a pressing problem. Competition, I have suggested, is not immoral if it is a competition in doing honest work by honourable means, and if it is also a fair competition. But it must, of course, be added, that fairness includes more than the simple equality of chances. It supposes, also, that there should be some proportion between the rewards and the merits. If it is simply a question between two men, which shall be captain of a ship, and which shall be mate, then the best plan is to decide by their merits as sailors; and, if their merits be fairly tried, the loser need bear no grudge against the winner. But when we have such cases as sometimes occur, when, for example, the ship is cast away, and it becomes a question whether I shall eat you or you shall eat me, or, let us say, which of us is to have the last biscuit, we get one of those terrible cases of temptation in which the strongest social bonds sometimes give way under the strain. The competition, then, becomes, in the highest degree, demoralising, and the struggle for existence resolves itself into a mere unscrupulous scramble for life, at any sacrifice of others. That, it is sometimes said, is a parallel to our social state at present. If I gave an excessive prize to the first boy in a school and flogged the second, I should not be doing justice. If one man is rewarded for a moderate amount of forethought by becoming a millionaire, and his unsuccessful rivals punished by starvation or the workhouse, the lottery of life is not arranged on principles of justice. A man must be a very determined optimist if he denied the painful truth to be found in such statements. He must be blind to many evils if he does not perceive the danger of dulling his sympathies by indifference to the fate of the unsuccessful. The rich man in Clough's poem observes that, whether there be a God matters very little-- For I and mine, thank somebody, Manage to get our victual. But, even if we are not very rich, we must often, I think, doubt whether we are not wrapping ourselves in a spirit of selfish complacency when we are returning to a comfortable home and passing outcasts of the street. We must sometimes reflect that our comfort is not simply a reward for virtue or intelligence, even if it be not sometimes the prize of actual dishonesty. To shut our eyes to the mass of wretchedness around us is to harden our hearts, although to open our hands is too often to do more harm than good. It is no wonder that we should be tempted to declaim against competition, when the competition means that so many unfortunates are to be crowded off their narrow standing-ground into the gulf of pauperism.