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INTRO D UCTION 
and only really efficacious incentive to all productive activity, 
all good economic administration, and, above all, all improve 
ment. No doubt laws and regulations might modify the 
conditions under which competition acts, so as to place com 
petitors more upon an equality, and to effect that, each man 
possessing the requisites of production, no one should be 
obliged to accept insufficient wages through fear of starvation. 
True freedom of contract in that case existing, competition, 
which is the indispensable mainspring of the economic world, 
would be freed from the greater part of the disastrous effects 
now laid to its charge. 
Ranke, the historian, has shown how Protestantism, by its 
very attacks upon the Papacy, provoked a reform in the bosom 
of the Romish Church whereby new life was infused into her. 
In the same way, the wisest Economists of our time have recog 
nized that the exaggerated, but often well founded, criticisms 
passed upon our social system by Socialists, have been the 
means of producing undoubted progress in Political Economy. 
Thus Economists used to affirm that our social organization 
was the result of “natural laws,” and itself constituted “the 
natural order of things.” It followed, as Cairnes observes, that 
the well-to-do classes gathered from the writings of the Econo 
mists the comfortable conviction that the existing world was 
not far off from perfection, and were thus led to reject without 
examination any idea of a better organization as chimerical. 
Nowadays most Economists recognize that everything con 
cerning the distribution of wealth is the result of laws and 
customs which have varied at different times, and that, con 
sequently, a more strict application of justice might introduce 
a great improvement. Formerly Economists occupied them 
selves principally with the increase of production, while they 
merely described the distribution of wealth without examining 
if it was conformable to justice, and studied labour merely as 
the natural agent of production. To-day we recognize more 
and more that the question which overshadows all others is 
that of distribution, that every problem must be considered, 
especially in its moral and juridical aspect, and that the just 
reward of the workman is what is most important when con-