e industrial oligarchy alike would instinctively
oppose, and would also be in a position to check, the practical
development of any competition from without.

That this is no fanciful estimate can be shown by an appeal to facts. We
may take as an example the case of the British post-office. The
inefficient transmission of letters some twenty years ago in London
provoked an effort to supplement it by a service of private messengers.
The post-office authorities were instantly up in arms, ready to nip this
enterprise in the bud, and forcibly prevent any other human being from
doing what they were still, to all appearance, determined not to do
themselves.[11] Then, as a grudging concession, permission to transmit
letters with a promptitude which the post-office still declined to
emulate was accorded to a company on condition that for each letter
carrier the post-office should be paid as it would have been had it
carried the letter itself; and thus there was established at last the
institution of the Boy Messengers.

Similar examples are afforded by the conduct of the state in France,
where the manufacture of tobacco and matches are both of them state
monopolies. To say that the tobacco produced by the French state is
unsmokable, and that the matches produced by it will not light a candle,
would no doubt be an exaggeration; but they are both inferior to the
products which private enterprise could, if left to itself, produce at
the same price. And private enterprise is, indeed, not wholly
suppressed. Excellent tobacco and matches, both of private manufacture,
are allowed to be sold in France; but the producers of both are
artificially handicapped by having to pay to the state, on every box or
every pound sold, either the whole or part of the profit which the state
itself would have made by selling an equal quantity of its own inferior
articles.

The very fact, indeed, that the state, as a producer, or a renderer of
public services, such as letter-carrying, has thus to protect itself
against the competition of private enterprise, is sufficient evidence of
the difficulties which a state organisation encounters in securing
industrial ability which shall be constantly of the highest kind, and
also of its inevitable tendency to hamper, if not to stifle, the
development and the practical activity of superior ability elsewhere.
And if these difficulties and this tendency are appreciable in
state-directed industries now, when the