loses
his customers, and can direct labour no longer, or is obliged to direct
it on a very much reduced scale. But if each director of labour owed, as
he would do under socialism, his means of directing it, not to the
results of his individual efficiency, but to a single common
source--namely, to the collective capital of the country or the forcible
authority of the law--there is nothing in the fact that one constructor
of ships wastes labour in constructing them which another constructor
would have saved, to prevent him from continuing in his post, or even to
insure that he will vacate it in favour of an abler man, whether an
official rival or otherwise, as soon as such a man is available.

There is also this further fact to be noted. Although we are assuming
that the socialistic directors of labour will exert their talents to the
utmost without requiring the stimulus of a proportionate reward in
money, we must necessarily assume that they will value their posts for
some reason or other just as much as they would do were the largest
emoluments attached to them. Consequently we may, condescending to
vulgar language, say, as a certainty, that they will do their very best
to stick to them. All these official persons, as contrasted with the
labouring public, will occupy positions of similar and desirable
privilege; and while their latent rivalry among themselves will be
hampered in the manner just indicated, they will none of them be
inclined to welcome any further rivalry from without. If the least
efficient of our two naval constructors could not be forced by the fact
of his relative inefficiency to hand over all or any portion of his
authority to the other, and would certainly not be likely to do so of
his own free will, it is still less likely that either would be willing
to make such a sacrifice in favour of a man outside the privileged
ranks, who desired an opportunity of demonstrating his practical
superiority to both.

Under a system, in short, like that which we are now contemplating, the
ability of the ablest directors might, in each branch of industry, raise
the efficiency of the labour directed by themselves to as high a pitch
as that to which it could be raised by the competition of to-day. But
the successes of the ablest men would have no tendency to
self-extension. The ablest men would do better than the less able, but
would have no tendency to displace them; and the ablest and the least
able members of th