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tory shows that in modern competitive industry the motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand, the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the other hand, the _entrepreneur_, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking. (4) The same charges of weakened individual interest, want of plasticity and enterprise, routine torpidity, are in a measure applicable to every large business as compared with a smaller. Adam Smith considered them fatal barriers to the growth of joint-stock enterprise outside a certain narrowly-defined range. But the economies of the large business were found to outweigh these considerations. So a well-ordered state-industry may be the most economical in spite of diminished elasticity and enterprise. But while these considerations qualify the force of the contention that state-control would give no scope for industrial progress, they do not refute it. The justification of the assumption by the State of various functions, military, judicial, industrial, is that a safe orderly routine in the conduct of these affairs is rightly purchased by a loss of elasticity and a diminished pace of progress. The arts of war and of justice would probably make more advance under private enterprise than under public administration, and there is no reason to deny that postal and railway services are slower to adopt improvements when they pass under government control. It may be generally admitted that, as the large modern industries pass from the condition of huge private monopolies to public departments, the routine character will grow in them, and they will become less experimental and more mechanical. It is the nature of machines to be mechanical, and the perfection of machine-industries, as of single machines, will be the perfection of routine. Just in proportion as the machine has established its dominancy over the various industries, so will they increase in size, diminish in flexibility, and grow ripe for admission, as routine businesses, into the ranks of state-industry
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