t as
it is now, so long as this precise situation lasted. But it could not
last. It would be transitory in its very nature. The present generation
of industrial directors would die, and in order that the efficiency of
the state as the director of labour might be maintained, other men would
have to be discovered who were possessed of equal ability in the first
place, and who in the second could be trusted or compelled to use it
unremittingly to the utmost, in the absence of the main motive which has
actuated such men hitherto.

Apart from the problems involved in these two requirements, neither the
theory of production which is put forward, nor the productive system
which is advocated, by the intellectual socialists of to-day, contains
anything with which theoretically the most uncompromising of their
opponents could quarrel. It is on these two problems that everything
will be found to turn--one being the problem of how, under the
conditions which socialism would introduce, the ablest men could be
discovered, and invested according to their efficiency with the
requisite industrial authority; the other being the problem of how,
under the same conditions, it would be possible to secure from such men
that full exertion of their talents, on which the material prosperity of
the entire community would depend.

For socialists these two problems may be said to be practically new. So
long as socialism based itself on the Marxian theory of production, the
selection, and the subsequent conduct of the men who would compose the
industrial state presented no appreciable difficulties. For the state
would, according to this theory, be in no sense the director of the
labourers; it would merely be their humble servant. It would be like an
old woman who sat all day long in a barn, counting, sorting, and making
up into equal shares the different products brought in to her by her
sons, who worked out of her sight in a dozen different fields; or,
to quote the words of one of my late socialistic correspondents,
the functions of the industrial state would be "simply
industrial-clerical." The industrial state would consist of clerks and
shop-boys, the former of whom added up accounts, while the latter
weighed, sorted, and handed out goods over a counter. If the industrial
state were to be nothing more than this, the selection of an adequate
personnel would doubtless present no difficulties. But as soon as the
socialistic theory recognises that