Competition, in a
word, is liberty in division and in all the divided parts:
beginning with the most comprehensive functions, it tends toward
its realization even in the inferior operations of parcellaire
labor.
Here the communists raise an objection. It is necessary, they
say, in all things, to distinguish between use and abuse. There
is a useful, praiseworthy, moral competition, a competition which
enlarges the heart and the mind, a noble and generous
competition,--it is emulation; and why should not this emulation
have for its object the advantage of all? There is another
competition, pernicious, immoral, unsocial, a jealous competition
which hates and which kills,--it is egoism.
So says communism; so expressed itself, nearly a year ago, in its
social profession of faith, the journal, "La Reforme."
Whatever reluctance I may feel to oppose men whose ideas are at
bottom my own, I cannot accept such dialectics. "La Reforme," in
believing that it could reconcile everything by a distinction
more grammatical than real, has made use, without suspecting it,
of the golden mean,-- that is, of the worst sort of diplomacy.
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