ecked, because
of its unfairness to those who suffer from it. Thus the American
industrial system would gradually become petrified, and the national
organization of American industry would be sacrificed for the benefit of
an indiscriminate collection of local interests.

If the interest of a corporation is so essentially hostile to the public
interest as to require the sort of official supervision provided by the
New York Public Service Commission Law, the logical inference therefrom
is not a system of semi-official and semi-private management, but a
system of exclusively public management. The logical inference therefrom
is public ownership, if not actual public operation. Public ownership is
not open to the same theoretical objections as is government by
commission. It is not a system of divided responsibility. Political
conditions and the organization of the American civil service being what
they are, the attempt of the authorities to assume such a responsibility
might not be very successful; but the fault would in that case reside in
the general political and administrative organization. The community
could not redeem the particular responsibility of owning and operating a
railroad, because it was not organized for the really efficient conduct
of any practical business. The rejection of a system of divided personal
responsibility between public and private officials does not
consequently bring with it necessarily the rejection of a system of
public ownership, if not public operation; and if it can be demonstrated
in the case of any particular class of corporations that its interest
has become in any essential respect hostile to the public interest, a
constructive industrial policy demands, not a partial, but a much more
complete, shifting of the responsibility.

That cases exist in which public ownership can be justified on the
foregoing grounds, I do not doubt; but before coming to the
consideration of such cases it must be remarked that this new phase of
the discussion postulates the existence of hitherto neglected conditions
and objects of a constructive industrial policy. Such a policy started
with the decision, which may be called the official decision, of the
American electorate, to recognize the existing corporate economic
organization; and we have been inquiring into the implications of this
decision. Those implications include, according to the results of the
foregoing discussion, not only a repeal of the