ral character
of perishable individuals, would possess all the weaknesses charged
against State socialism without any of the educative advantages or the
security and stability of that system. The "captain of industry"
remedy is a sentimental and not a scientific one. Once regard
"sweating" as a case of arrested development and the true line of
progress will be seen to lie in the absorption of these backward
industries into the main current of industrial movement, leaving them
to pass through the necessary phases of machine-production and to be
subjected to an increasing pressure of social control until they are
ripe for society to undertake. Then there will remain outside of
capitalist machine-industry only that class of work which is artistic
and therefore individualistic in character.

Sec. 9. We now stand face to face with the main objection so often raised
against all endeavours to remedy industrial and social diseases by the
expansion of public control. Competition and the zest of individual
gain, it is urged, furnish the most effective incentive to enterprise
and discovery. Assuming that society were structurally competent to
administer industry officially, the establishment of industrial order
would be the death-blow to industrial progress. The strife, danger,
and waste of industrial competition are necessary conditions to
industrial vitality.

How much force do these objections contain in the light of the
information provided by our study of industrial evolution? It should
be recognised at the outset that the economic individualist is not a
conservative, defending an established order and pointing out the
dangers attending proposed innovations. Our analysis of the structure
of modern industry shows the progressive socialisation of certain
classes of industry as a step in the order of events, equally natural
and necessary with the earlier steps by which machine-industry
superseded handicraft and crystallised in ever larger masses with
changing relations to one another. The indictment against social
control over industry is an indictment against a natural order of
events, on the ground that nature has taken a wrong road of
advancement. It is only possible to regard the legislative action by
which public control over industry is established as "unnatural" or
"artificial" by excluding from "Nature" those social forces which find
expression in Acts of Parliament, an eminently unscientific mode of
reasoning.

But