a higher degree of efficiency by pooling resources and paying salaries to officials who have no direct interest in the total output than by keeping everything under "the master's eye," which, we used to be assured, was the only way to obtain success. The great industrial combines have proportionately lessened the cost of production by concentrating the machinery of administration, differentiating functions, and taking in as many branches of production as possible. The old maxim that in order to prosper a business must specialise is being falsified every day; the more a business can take in, and produce for itself, the more profit is it likely to make. If this be true on a limited scale, how much more on a national? If the salaried officer is proved efficient in a concern which is capitalised by a few thousand shareholders, and organised into a hundred different departments, he would prove equally efficient if the shareholders were the voters of the United Kingdom and the capital their united wealth. It may be pointed out that the operations of Trusts and Combines are international, and that it is therefore impossible to make the nation an economic unit. This may be freely admitted without weakening the force of the Socialist argument; on the contrary, it will but strengthen it. The mere fact that Trusts and Combines have it in their power at present to restrict output and force up prices should induce every civilised community to nationalise its own industries, for this means obtaining the

control of markets and preventing any one class in the community from exploiting the rest. If any Trust or Combine outside the Socialised State were to discriminate against it, the results would not therefore be so serious as they could be at present. And in any case the aims of Socialism are international in their scope. It knows no desire to exploit one country for the benefit of another, for it rightly judges that in the long run this is an injury inflicted upon the perpetrator. The course here recommended is the one towards which the economic forces of the time are steadily tending. The small producer and trader, as well as the isolated specialiser, are gradually being eliminated by vast producing and distributing concerns which are turning what used to be proprietors into wageearners. The process is hard upon the immediate victims, but it is good for society; and it will have to continue until the wage system becomes universal, no servant of the public being exempted from its operation.

This will mean no degradation, no deadening of initiative, and no barrack system of control over the individual. The socialised community will do exactly what the big concern does now with those in its service; it will promote the best men to the best posts, and it will judge of their fitness by the quality of their work. In one respect it will differ from the big business of the present day, and that is that the less efficient will not be

turned on the streets to starve. Every citizen a shareholder will mean that every citizen will be secure of at least the bare necessaries of life without the grinding anxiety and fearful drudgery in which at present so many of them have to live. This one result alone would be enough to justify the change.

Industrial statesmanship. —Our statesmen will be then what our captains of industry are now, and the field of their activities will be vastly enlarged. Instead of an order of professional politicians we should of necessity have every business man politician and every politician a business man. Instead of our present high officers of State we should be asking ourselves what public man of business could be entrusted with the direction of the nation's railways; who should be qualified to control the nation's shipping; who should be administratively supreme over the nation's agriculture. If the nation's soap were considered of sufficient importance to have a department of its own, I have no doubt Mr. Lever would be at the head of it with a salary commensurate to his worth. His range of opportunity for the exercise of his remarkable organising abilities would be even greater then than it is now, and it is probable that he would value the position more. The Chancellor of the Exchequer would have to extend his horizon. In planning his budget the first thing he would have to allow for would be the probable amount of the primal necessities of life-food, clothing,

and shelter-which the nation would require in any given year, and his basis of calculation would be the experience of previous years. This done he would know what probable margin of the nation's income would remain for the provision of other things. How that margin would be administered would be a matter of public opinion and demand. For this national organisation of industry means the provision of a wider life for all than we at present dream of, and it remains to be shown how this wider life can be brought about.

CHAPTER IX

THE SOCIALISED STATE: I

The worth of the State. In the preceding chapter I have ventured to indicate briefly what seem to me to be the principal tendencies at work in the direction of the socialising of industry. These tendencies cannot but culminate in a form of State organisation widely different from that with which we are familiar at present, although evolved therefrom. It is impossible to say what will be the outcome, say, a hundred years hence, but in broad outline it is already on the horizon, and those on the look-out are able to distinguish some of its outstanding features. The sketching of Utopias is always an interesting occupation, and in the hands of a master like Mr. H. G. Wells, who is even more of a political philosopher than a fiction writer, it may become profitable and inspiring to others. But I do not propose to attempt to describe an Utopian society. In the two chapters which follow I have set myself the humbler task of describing what is already on the way, and may fairly be expected as the result of the forces at work in our midst. In a word, we may say that our social organisation is gradually becoming moralised, in