he general tendency of industry, so far as it falls under
modern economies of machinery and method, is either towards wasteful
competition or towards monopoly, it is to be expected that there will
be a continual expansion of State interference and State undertakings.
This growing socialisation of industry must be regarded as the natural
adjustment of society to the new conditions of machine-production. As
under the economies of machine-production the business-unit, the mass
of capital and labour forming a single "firm" or "business," grows
larger in size and more potent in its operations, the social
disturbances which it can occasion by its private activity, the
far-reaching and momentous results of its strain of competition, the
probability of an anti-social exercise of "monopolic" power over the
whole or part of its market-area, will of necessity increase. The
railway and shipping industries, for example, in countries like
England and the United States, have already reached a stage of
industrial development when the social danger arising from an
arbitrary fixing of rates by a line or a "pool" of lines, from a
strike or lock-out of "dockers" or railway men, is gaining keener
recognition every year. The rapidly growing organisation of both
capital and labour, especially in the fundamental industries of coal,
iron, and machine-making, in the machine-transport industries, and the
most highly evolved manufactories, gives to a body of employers or
employed, or to a combination of both, the power at any moment to
paralyse the whole or a large portion of the entire trade of a country
in pursuit of some purely private interest or resentment, or in the
acquisition of some strategical position, which shall enable them to
strengthen their competing power or gain a monopoly. Although the
organisation of masses of capital and of labour may, as is often
urged, make industrial strife less frequent, the effects of such
strife upon the wider public, who have no opportunity of casting a
vote for war or peace, are more momentous. Moreover, as these private
movements of capital and labour proceed, the probability of combined
action between employers and employed in a particular industry, to
secure for themselves some advantages at the public expense, will be
a factor of increasing importance in industrial evolution.

The Trade Union movement and the various growths of Industrial
Partnership, valuable as they are from many points of view,