themselves outside it of the liberty of doing so. Unless their action could be brought within the first line of argument, sufficient reason for restraint does not appear. As for the hopeless class whose existence is made a plea for restrictive legislation, the economist may forcibly argue that they have never been left to learn the full force of the lessons of experience, and it is the impatient interference of thoughtless men and thoughtless laws which allows this class to be perpetually recruited.

The limitations of individual liberty, to which I have referred, are familiar to us, and have obtained a firm hold in our legislation; but we enter upon comparatively new ground when we turn to the proposals that an increasing number of industries should be undertaken and directed by State or municipality, and that a minimum and not inadequate subsistence should be assured to all those engaged in such industries, if indeed the principle be not presently extended outside the monopolies so established. The ideas which are clothed in the phrases "The socialisation of the "instruments of industry," and "The guarantee of a minimum 'wage to all workmen," appear to involve a complete reorganisation of society, and an absolute abandonment of the theories of the past. This is not enough to justify their immediate rejection or their immediate acceptance. The past has not been so good that we can refuse to look at any proposals, however strange in appearance, offering a better promise for the future. It has not been so bad that we must abandon its methods in despair, as if no change could be for the worse, if not for the better. A patient inquirer, feeling his way along the movement of his time, may even be constrained to accept a patchwork covering of life instead of the ideal garment woven without seam throughout; or he may be led to see that the harmony of society, like the harmony of the physical universe, must be the result of divers forces, out of which is developed a perfect curve.

No one could now be found to deny the possibility, and few to question the utility, of the socialisation of some services. The post office is in all civilised countries organised as a national institution, and the complaints that are sometimes heard as to defects in its administration never extend to a demand for its abolition. Jevons, in a careful paper, showed that the same financial success which marks our present postal system, must not be expected from the nationalisation of the telegraph service, and he dismissed even suggestions for the nationalisation of railways. His predictions have been amply verified with respect to the telegraph account; but telegraphs are a national service amongst ourselves, and railways are largely nationalised in many continental countries, and in some of our own colonies and dependencies. Some of our

largest municipalities have undertaken the supply of water and of gas, or even of electric light, to the inhabitants, and a movement has begun, which seems likely to be extended, of undertaking the service of tramways. Demands have also been made for the municipalisation or nationalisation of the telephone service.

It may be said of all the industries thus described as taken over, or likely to be taken over, by the nation and local communities, that when they are not so taken over they require for their exercise special powers and privileges conceded by the State or community, and the conditions of such concessions are settled by agreement between the community and the body or bodies exercising such industries. These conditions may involve the payment of a fixed sum, or of a rent for the concession, or the terms upon which the services are to be rendered may be prescribed in a stipulated tariff of charges, or the amount of profit to be realised by the concessionaires may be limited with provisions for reduction of charge when such limit is reached, or it may be required that in working such industries certain limits of wages shall be observed as the minima to be paid to the workmen employed upon them. Speaking very broadly, it may be said that the community delegates or leases the right of practising the industry, and there is no impassable gulf between prescribing the terms on which a lease shall be worked and assuming the conduct of the industry leased. There may be difficulties in the management by a community of a cumbrous and unwieldy undertaking, but there is no difficulty affecting the organisation of society when the undertaking must be created and shaped by the community in the first place. The arguments against the assumption of such monopolies by State or local authorities are those of expediency, founded on a comparison of gain and loss. It may be urged that there are more forcible motives of economy on the part of a concessionaire than on the part of a community working the undertaking itself; that improvements of method and reductions of cost will be more carefully sought; and although such improvements and reductions might in theory be realised by the workmen and agents of a community, which would thus secure all the savings effected by them, yet private interest is quicker in discovery and more fertile in suggestion, and it is more profitable in the end for the community to allow a concessionaire to secure such profits, subject to a stipulation that some part of them should return to the community in the way either of increased money payment, or of reduced rates of charge for the services performed. It may be urged that when a community works an industry itself, it may do so at a loss, thus benefiting those who specially require its services at the cost of the whole body; but this objection is

not peculiar to undertakings so directly worked. It is a matter of common experience for State or municipality to grant important subventions to persons willing to undertake such works on stipulated terms of service, and such subventions involve a levy from the whole community for the benefit of those availing themselves of the services.

New considerations of great difficulty arise when we pass to the suggestion of the undertaking by local authorities of productive industries not in the nature of monopolies. In monopolies direct competition, often competition in any shape, is practically impossible; in other industries competition is a general rule; and it is by virtue of such competition that the members of the community do in the long run obtain their wants supplied in the most economical manner. When commodities are easily carried without serious deterioration, the constantly changing conditions of production and of transport induce a constant variation in the sources of cheapest supply-that is of supply under conditions of least toil and effort and any arrest of this mobility involves a corresponding set-back in the advancement of the economic condition of mankind. It is a necessary consequence of this process that the local production of special commodities should be subject to diminution and extinction, and that the labours hitherto engaged in such local production should become gradually worthless. Quite as much labour as before might be expended in achieving the result, but it would be misapplied; it ought not to command the same return; it should cease. It is at least difficult to foresee how far the production of commodities exposed to free competition could be maintained by communities themselves in face of the movement we have described. There would be a danger of pressure to do away with invasive competition-action which, in my judgment, would be destructive of the most powerful cause of improvement in the condition of the people. There would be an allied danger of a refusal to recognise the possibility of a diminished worth of work which remains as toilsome as ever, and of an increasing congestion of labour when the great movement of the world demands its dispersion. It may be that those evils are not inevitable, but they would require to be faced if any serious attempt were made to increase the range of national or municipal industries, and I have not yet seen any attempt at their serious investigation.

The position thus taken may be illustrated by an experience to which I have elsewhere referred, but so pregnant with suggestion that I need not apologise for recalling it. My native county, Cornwall, was in my boyhood the scene of widespread activity in copper and tin mining. There had not been wanting warnings

that the competition of richer deposits in far countries would put an end to these industries in the county, but the warnings had not been realised and remained unheeded. In the years that have since passed they have been gradually and almost completely fulfilled. There are no copper mines now in Cornwall, and the tin mines, which were scattered far and wide throughout the county, are reduced to two or three within one limited area. It is not the case that the ores have been exhausted; they could still be raised, but at a cost of production making the process unprofit able. The mines were abandoned one by one, and the population of the county has steadily diminished in every recent census. What would the experience have been had the mines been a county or national property worked by county or nation? I do not stop to comment on the difficulty of expropriating present owners, which, however, must not be forgotton. If the collective owner had leased the mines to companies of adventurers (to use the local phrase), the lessees would have gradually relinquished their concessions, as they have done when taking them from private owners. Nor would the case have been materially different even if the collective owner had introduced the novel stipulation into his leases that the working miners should be paid according to prescribed rates of wages. The process of relinquishment might have been precipitated and accelerated by insisting on such a condition, but otherwise the experience would have been the same. The shrinkage of industry would go on without a check, and it is to be hoped that the workmen who found their work failing would, with the fine courage and enterprise they have in fact shown, have betaken themselves to the fields of mining industry displacing their own in all parts of the world. Can one think that the same process would have been maintained had the collective owner worked the mines directly, and the working men looked to country or nation for the continuance of work and wages? The attachment which all men have for the homes of themselves and their fathers would have stimulated a demand for a recurrence to the other resources of the collective owner for the maintenance of an industry that was dying. Some demand might even be made for a repression or prohibition of that competition which was the undoing of the local industry. These possibilities may be regarded as fanciful, and it is true that forces might be kept under control that operated within an area and affected a population relatively so limited. But what if the warnings of Jevons respecting coal in England proved like the warnings of the men who foresaw the cessation of tin mining in Cornwall, and the community had to deal with the problem of the dwindling coal industry in face of nationalised coal mines and armies of workmen employed by the

nation? The initial difficulties of the nationalisation of that which for centuries has been the subject of private property are formidable, but they could doubtless be overcome by the short and simple process of confiscation. This transformation is theoretically conceivable. It is in the subsequent development of the scheme. of nationalised and municipalised industries that we are confronted with tasks not so easy of solution. How is its working to be reconciled with that opening up of more and more productive fields which is one of the prime factors of social progress? How is the allotment of men to be directed so that they may be shifted about as new centres open and old centres close ? What checks or commands can be invoked to restrain the growth of population in a district when it should be dwindling? These are questions that can scarcely be put aside, and it may even be acknowledged that they gain fresh force when viewed in the light of another experience. Agricultural industry has recently been subjected to severe trials through a great breadth of this country. This has been due to cheaper importations from other lands, and though the competition has in my judgment been aggravated by causes into which I will not now digress (which aggravation however might and should be dealt with), the importation of food at less cost is a result no economist will regard as otherwise than beneficial to the community as a whole. It is well that bread and flesh and the sustenance of life should be procured with as little toil as possible, however severe the trial for those who have been engaged hitherto in the production of those necessaries. We know that it has been so severe that demands for relief and assistance have been loudly made, and their power has been such as to have been in some measure successful; but had land been nationalised and farms held from the State or from county, town, or parish, they would have assumed a different shape, have been urged with greater purpose, and have received larger treatment. The difficulties of such a nationalised industry, passing into what may be described as a water-logged condition, would test beyond the straining point such states manship as our experience warrants us to believe possible.

However much we may contemplate the construction of an industrial system, it must, if it is to be a living social organism, be constantly responsive to the ever-changing conditions of growth; some parts must wax whilst others wane, extending here and contracting there, and manifesting at every moment those phenomena of vigour and decline which characterise life. In the development of industry new and easier ways are constantly being invented of doing old things; places are being discovered better suited for old industries than those to which resort had been