I have sketched in “The Jungle” (Chapter 36) a few of the social savings incidental to the abolition of competition. The reader who cares for a thorough and scientific study of the subject is referred to a recently published book, “The Cost of Competition,” by Sidney A. Reeve. I had never heard of Professor Reeve until his publishers sent me his book. They say that he worked on it for seven years; and when I read it I counted myself that many years to the good, for I had meant to try to do the task myself. Professor Reeve has done it in a way which leaves not a word to be said. It is a marvellous analysis of the whole of our present productive system; and best of all, it is free from the jargon of the schools—it is the work of a man who has kept in touch with actual life, and has moral feeling as well as scientific training. Professor Reeve analyses, not merely the “economic costs” of competition, but also the “ethical costs,” which after all are the most important. The difference to the workingman will be, not merely that his wages will be several times as great, but that he himself will no longer be a wage-slave, obliged to serve another man for his bread, to cringe and grovel for a a job, to toil all day for another man’s profit, and save up his little hoard and live in dread of the next wage reduction, the next strike, or the next closing down of the factory. He will be a free and independent member of a coöperative State. He will be delivered from the necessity of getting the better of his neighbour, because his neighbour will no longer be able to get the better of him. He will be certain of permanent employment, without possibility of loss or failure of payment—certain that so long as he works he will receive just what he produces, that in case of accident or old age he will be maintained, and that in case of death his children will be cared for and brought up to become coöperative partners in the great Industrial Republic. [Illustration: _From “The Cost of Competition_” THE COOPERATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION The Congressional Library ] [Illustration: _From “The Cost of Competition_” THE COMPETITIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION ] How, you ask, could Socialism guarantee every man permanent employment? Could there not be overproduction under Socialism? There could not; the surplus product being the property of the man who had produced it, and not, as now, the property of some other man, in a case of overproduction the workingman would be, not out of work, but on a vacation. As a matter of fact, only a reasonable surplus would be produced, because the workingman would stop when he had produced what he wanted—just as you stop eating when you have satisfied your hunger.