The fusion of all private capitals into a single state capital
would make this solution impossible, and would provide no other.
The only machinery by which the more efficient directors of
labour could be discriminated from the less efficient would be
broken. Case of the London County Council's steamboats.

Two forms which the industrial state under socialism might
conceivably take: The official directors of industry might be
either an autocratic bureaucracy, or they might else be subject
to elected politicians representing the knowledge and opinions
prevalent among the majority.

Estimate of the results which would arise in the former case.
Illustrations from actual bureaucratic enterprise.

Estimate of the results which would arise in the latter case.
The state, as representing the average opinion of the masses,
brought to bear on scientific industrial enterprise.
Illustrations.

The state as sole printer and publisher. State capitalism would
destroy the machinery of industrial progress just as it would
destroy the machinery by which thought and knowledge develop.

But behind the question of whether socialism could provide
ability with the conditions or the machinery requisite for its
exercise is the question of whether it could provide it with any
adequate stimulus.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY.
SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT

Mr. Sidney Webb, and most modern socialists of the higher kind,
recognise that this problem of motive underlies all others.

They approach it indirectly by sociological arguments borrowed
from other philosophers, and directly by a psychology peculiar
to themselves.

The sociological arguments by which socialists seek to minimise
the claims of the able man.

These founded on a specific confusion of thought, which vitiated
the evolutionary sociology of that second half of the nineteenth
century. Illustrations from Herbert Spencer, Macaulay, Mr. Kidd,
and recent socialists.

The confusion in question a confusion between speculative truth
and practical.

The individual importance of the able man, untouched by the
speculative conclusions of the sociolog