. If
the chief object of society was to secure continual progress in
military arts and to educate to the utmost the military qualities, it
would be well to leave fighting to private enterprise instead of
establishing state monopolies in the trade of war. It sacrifices this
competition, with the progress it induces and the personal fitness it
evolves, in order that the individual enterprise of its members may be
exercised in the competition of industrial arts, inducing industrial
progress and evolving industrial fitness. The substitution of
industrialism for warfare is not, however, understood to imply a
diminution of individual enterprise, but an alteration in its
application.

If, starting from this point of view, we regard human life as
comprising an infinite number of activities of different sorts,
operating upon different planes of competition and educating different
human "fitnesses," we shall understand how the particular phase of
industrial evolution we are considering is related to the wider
philosophic view of life. All progress, from primitive savagedom to
modern civilisation, will then appear as consisting in the progressive
socialisation of the lower functions, the stoppage of lower forms of
competition and of the education of the more brutal qualities, in
order that a larger and larger proportion of individual activity may
be engaged in the exercise of higher functions, the practice of
competition upon higher planes, and the education of higher forms of
fitness.

If the history of past civilisation shows us this, there is an _a
priori_ presumption that each further step in the repression of
individual enterprise and in the extension of state-control does not
mean a net diminution in individual activity or any relaxation of
effort in self-assertion, but merely an elevation of the plane of
competition and of the kind of human qualities engaged. This is, in
fact, the philosophical defence of progressive socialism, that human
progress requires that one after another the lower material animal
functions shall be reduced to routine, in order that a larger amount
of individual effort may be devoted to the exercise of higher
functions and the cultivation by strife of higher qualities.

To suppose that the reduction of all machine-industry to public
routine services, when it becomes possible, will imply a net
diminution in the scope of individual self-expression, rests upon the
patent fallacy of assigning certai