ents at Bournville and their general social and political
activities are broad and constructive in the best sense. But they find
themselves in the peculiar dilemma that they must either abandon an
important and profitable portion of their great manufacture or continue
to buy produce grown under cruel and even horrible conditions. Their
retirement from the branch of the cocoa and chocolate trade concerned
would, under these circumstances, mean no diminution of the manufacture
or of the horrors of this particular slavery; it would merely mean that
less humanitarian manufacturers would step in to take up the abandoned
trade. The self-righteous individualist would have no doubts about the
question; he would keep his hands clean anyhow, retrench his social
work, abandon the types of cocoa involved, and pass by on the other
side. But indeed I do not believe we came into the mire of life simply
to hold our hands up out of it. Messrs. Cadbury follow a better line;
they keep their business going, and exert themselves in every way to
let light into the secrets of Portuguese East Africa and to organize a
better control of these labour cruelties. That I think is altogether the
right course in this difficulty.

We cannot keep our hands clean in this world as it is. There is no
excuse indeed for a life of fraud or any other positive fruitless
wrong-doing or for a purely parasitic non-productive life, yet all but
the fortunate few who are properly paid and recognized state servants
must in financial and business matters do their best amidst and through
institutions tainted with injustice and flawed with unrealities. All
Socialists everywhere are like expeditionary soldiers far ahead of the
main advance. The organized state that should own and administer their
possessions for the general good has not arrived to take them over; and
in the meanwhile they must act like its anticipatory agents according to
their lights and make things ready for its coming.

The Believer then who is not in the public service, whose life lies
among the operations of private enterprise, must work always on the
supposition that the property he administers, the business in which
he works, the profession he follows, is destined to be taken over and
organized collectively for the commonweal and must be made ready for
the taking over; that the private outlook he secures by investment,
the provision he makes for his friends and children, are temporary,
wasteful, t