There is some competition in the world to-day among the nations; there was recently competition between Russia and Japan, and there will perhaps be competition between some of the others. But what competition is left to-day within the limits of the United States, is left simply because it is of a kind so petty that the capitalists have not yet had time to bother with it. For the most part it exists between a swarm of retailers of trust-made products, and takes the form of the screwing down of the wages of helpless clerks and errand-boys, the adulteration of products, and the placarding of the surface of the land with blatant advertisements which affect a decent man like the stench of a carcass. One of the “competitive” industries that is flourishing just now is that of cereals prepared in packages and labelled with names that suggest Hiawatha and the South Sea Islands. The usual price of one of these packages is fifteen cents, and of that, two cents and a half represents the cost of the product, and nearly all of the balance goes into the effort to trap the public into buying it. And did not the “boodle” investigations in Missouri disclose the fact that William Ziegler had spent a fortune in bribing newspapers and legislatures to implant in the public mind the idea that “alum baking-powders” were poisonous, so that the Royal Baking Powder Trust might have the custom of the country? But, you say, if competition perishes, what becomes of incentive—of initiative? Will not individual enterprise be destroyed? I answer that it depends entirely upon what you mean by individual enterprise. If you mean that ardent desire which now consumes every man to cut his neighbour’s economic throat, to get the better of him and make money out of him, to beat him down and leave him a financial wreck—why, civilisation will suppress this ardent desire in precisely the same way that it has suppressed the duel, or the right of private vengeance, and piracy, or the right of private war upon the high seas. The putting down of these things went hard, you know, for they had been the greatest glory of men, and all progress has been due to them. “Franz von Sickingen was a robber-knight,” writes Henderson, in his “History of Germany,” “but with such noble traits, and such a concept of his calling, that one wonders if he ought not rather to be put on the level of a belligerent prince. In carrying on feuds, he seldom aimed lower than a duke, or a free city of the Empire; and there are persons who insist to this day that his weapons were only drawn in favour of the oppressed. Be that as it may, he was not above exacting enormous fines; and being an excellent manager, he greatly increased his possessions. He was lord of many castles, which he furnished with splendid defences.”