ABSTRACT
This feature in industrial history makes it important to be resolutely clear about the social and moral function of the dealer. He evolves as a separate agent along with the other two parties, the seller and the buyer, to enable surplus to be exchanged for the mutual benefit of all three: the "willing seller"; the "willing buyer", and the dealer, the equally willing exchanger. Commerce from first to last evolves as a desire for mutual benefit, not for the selfish advantage for any one of the three. It is obvious that this social, brotherly, act of exchange can readily be converted into an engine of fraud and oppression; from the earliest times this was realized and the conscience of mankind denounced the greedy bargainer,
who either by superior knowledge ("cunning" as we now call it) or by excessive power secured an unjust advantage. In later ages the common mind, especially among those who enjoyed and controlled wealth, became corrupted; laws of "supply and demand" (see p. 109) were discovered and developed into rules of commercial art by which the dealer may see his way to secure for himself an excessive share of surplus, in the face of the other parties to his bargains, each of whom, under such laws, will behave, to use the speech of our forefathers, like "cozeners". However much our modern ways of thought may be obsessed by this so-called practical philosophy, we must be clear that "exchange is no robbery"; and that, so far as the progress of mankind depends upon exchange, the principle by which the' dealer lives must conform
in the long run to a higher law based, not on "unchecked competition", but on well-being. The epochs with which we are now concerned knew nothing of such laws, either of their partial truth or of their fundamental in-iquity. When society, as in years of war and famine, is faced with an upheaval of industry, the State ignores the principle of competition and
