It most be conceded that, important as are the workings of competition, ideal competition in which the buyer always seeks the che'Dpest and the seller the dearest market, in which capital is free to seek the place where labor is cheapest, and labor able to select the employment which others the best wages, is not and cannot be realized. As tendencies, the laws of competition are valuable regulative principles in the World's economic activity, even if tiny cannot be fulfilled to the letter. It has, however, been found impos sible wholly to overcome the inertia of custom, and impracticable to check all attempts at com bination which seek to destroy the competitive principle.
Custom and sentiment are supposed to have no place in lousiness, and in wholesale transactions this is quite true, but in the small transactions of daily life they have a large place. They owe it to the fact that we are slow to change acquired habits, especially where the gain to be secured is slight. Thus we find everywhere cus tomary prices for certain commodities and ser vices. The fares of railroads, terries, cabs, street railways, the services of physicians and lawyers, the fees of various public entertainments, are governed almost wholly by custom. These we accept or reject, but we do not haggle about them. in the long run, competition has some thing to do with such prices or with the goods or services they command, but in each individual transaction it hardly enters in as a factor. Tn the sale of completed commodities competition works out its effects most clearly. In the field of production it works amid inherent obstacles to its full development, and cannot have so ab solute a scope. Capital, as we have before hinted, is not migratory; it has its permanent instruments, which cannot be easily uprooted and transplanted. The farmer is not free to leave
his farm when he sees a chance of greater profit elsewhere. The workman is not free to pass from one employment to another, for he may lack the requisite training; nor is he often free to run to more remunerative fields of labor. Thus the immobility of capital and labor acts as a restraint upon the action of competition.
If the freest competition is in the interest of the community at large, it is equally true that such competition is always irksome to the COM petitors. It cannot be wondered that they seek means of counteracting its force through com bination. Such a combination may be a tacit understanding such as frequently exists among local dealers. It may be organized in great ag gregations of capital, which seek to dominate entire fields of productive effort. To a certain extent, such combinations may supplant direct competition as a regulative principle, hut they cannot obliterate it. entirely.
Nor is the regime of competition absolutely free from interference by law or governmental authority. Certain of the older economists ve hemently denounced factory legislation as an inroad upon the domain of competition. In more recent times it is, however, recognized that, while maintaining free competition as the basic prin ciple of industrial organization, it is in the gen eral interest that some of the conditions of competition be fixed by State action. Consult: Nettleton (editor). Trusts or Competition: Both sides of the great question in business, late, and polities (Chicago. 1900). See LABOR LEGISLA TION; POLITICAL ECONOMY; MONOPOLY ; TRADES UNIoNS ; TRUSTS; and consult the authorities there referred to.