area of direction is small and
strictly limited, the reader may easily imagine how incalculably more
formidable they would become if extended, as socialism would extend
them, to the activities of the entire community.

We have thus far been considering the position of the directors of
socialised industry on the assumption that they would be free to follow
the dictates of their own several intelligences, without any technical
interference from officials of any other kind. Let us now consider the
alternative which, in any socialistic society, would most closely
coincide with fact. This is the assumption that the official directors
of labour would not be technical autocrats, but would be subject to the
control of their brother officials, the statesmen, who represented the
great mass of the people.

Now, no doubt the intervention of a body of this kind might obviate some
of the difficulties on which we have just been dwelling. It might lead
to the removal of some directors of labour who were not only relatively
inefficient, but were positively and notoriously mischievous; but it
would introduce difficulties greater than those it obviated. For while
the industrial officials would, in exact proportion to their efficiency,
embody the special expertness peculiar to a gifted few, the political
officials, in proportion as they represented their electorate, would
embody the preponderating opinions and the general intelligence of the
many. The political officials, therefore, could, from the very nature
of the case, never represent any ideas or condition of knowledge which
appreciably transcended or conflicted with those of the least
intelligent; and the logical result would be that no industrial
improvements could in a socialistic community be initiated by the
highest intelligence, if they went beyond what could be apprehended and
consciously approved of by the lowest.

And here again, though our estimate is only general and speculative--for
it deals with a state of things which at present has no existence--we
can turn to historical facts for illustrations of its substantial truth.
For example, if in the days of Columbus all the capital of Europe and
the control of its entire labour had been vested in a government which
represented the all but universal opinion of all the western nations,
the discovery of America would have obviously been beyond the limits of
possibility. It was rendered possible only because Columbus secured two