med in the
national interest. It would stimulate the peculiarly efficient
individual by offering him opportunities for work commensurate with his
abilities and training. It would grant him these opportunities under
conditions which would tend to bring about their responsible use. And it
would seek to make the results promote the general economic welfare. The
peculiar advantage of the organization of American industry which has
gradually been wrought during the past fifty years is precisely the
opportunity which it has offered to men of exceptional ability to
perform really constructive economic work. The public interest has
nothing to gain from the mutilation or the destruction of these
nationalized economic institutions. It should seek, on the contrary, to
preserve them, just in so far as they continue to remain efficient; but
it should at the same time seek the better distribution of the fruits of
this efficiency. The great objection to the type of regulation
constituted by the New York Public Service Commission Law is that it
tends to deprive the peculiarly capable industrial manager of any
sufficient opportunity to turn his abilities and experience to good
account. It places him under the tutelage of public officials,
responsible to a public opinion which has not yet been sufficiently
nationalized in spirit or in purpose, and in case this tutelage fails of
its object (as it assuredly will) the responsibility for the failure
will be divided. The corporation manager will blame the commissions for
vexatious, blundering, and disheartening interference. The commissions
will blame the corporation manager for lack of cordial cooeperation. The
result will be either the abandonment of the experiment or the
substitution of some degree of public ownership. But in either event the
constructive economic work of the past two generations will be in some
measure undone; and the American economic advance will be to that extent
retarded. Such obnoxious regulation has been not unjustly compared to
the attempt to discipline a somewhat too vivacious bull by the simple
process of castration. For it must be substituted an economic policy
which will secure to the nation, and the individual the opportunities
and the benefits of the existing organization, while at the same time
seeking the diffusion of those benefits over a larger social area.

III

THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION

The only sound point of departure for a national