ble power of Parliament to alter the Act. In such a
case the Act could define how the authority should be constituted, on
what principles its functions should be performed, and how its profits,
if it made profits, should be distributed. And I suggest that there is
no reason why the Post Office itself should not be dealt with in this
way.

It is only a fleeting and superficial survey which I have been able to
give of the vast and complex themes on which I have touched; and there
is no single one of them with which I have been able to deal fully. My
purpose has been to show that in the political sphere as well as in the
social and economic spheres vast tasks lie before Liberalism, and,
indeed, that our social and economic tasks are not likely to be
efficiently performed unless we give very serious thought to the
political problem. Among the heavy responsibilities which lie upon our
country in the troubled time upon which we are entering, there is none
more heavy than the responsibility which rests upon her as the pioneer
of parliamentary government--the responsibility of finding the means
whereby this system may be made a respected and a trustworthy instrument
for the labours of reconstruction that lie before us.

THE STATE AND INDUSTRY

BY W.T. LAYTON

M.A., C.H., C.B.E.; Editor of the _Economist_, 1922; formerly Member of
Munitions Council, and Director of Economic and Financial Section of the
League of Nations; Director of Welwyn Garden City; Fellow of Gonville
and Caius College, Cambridge, 1910.

Mr. Layton said:--The existing system of private enterprise has been
seriously attacked on many grounds. For my present purpose I shall deal
with four: (1) The critic points to the extreme differences of wealth
and poverty which have emerged from this system of private enterprise;
(2) it has produced and is producing to-day recurrent periods of
depression which result in insecurity and unemployment for the worker;
(3) the critics say the system is producing great aggregations of
capital and monopolies, and that by throwing social power into the hands
of those controlling the capital of the country, it leads to
exploitation of the many by industrial and financial magnates; (4) it
produces a chronic state of internal war which saps industrial activity
and the economic life of the community.

I shall not attempt to minimise the force of these objections; but in
order to get our ideas into correct perspective it sh