ject is not to show that the state, as it exists at present, is
necessarily inimical to private enterprise as a whole. It is not, for it
has not the power to be. But the fact that even now, when its powers are
so strictly limited and its points of direct contact with industrial
enterprise are so few, tendencies of the kind develop themselves with
such marked practical consequences is enough to show the reality and
magnitude of the evils which would ensue if a body, which reflected on
the one hand the opinions of the average many, and on the other the
individual ability of a few, specially privileged and pledged to their
own methods, were the sole controller of all manual labour whatsoever,
the virtual owner of all the implements which exist at present, the sole
determiner of the forms which such implements shall assume in the
future, and also of the kinds and quantities of the consumable goods
which the implements and the labourers together shall from day to day
produce.

But the nature and scope of the effects which would be incident to any
general absorption, such as that contemplated by socialists, of
productive enterprise by the state, will be yet more clearly seen if we
turn to a kind of production on which I have dwelt already, as affording
the simplest and most luminous example possible of the respective parts
played in the modern world by ordinary manual labour and the exceptional
ability which directs it. This is the case of books, or of other printed
publications. Many years ago the English radical Charles Bradlaugh urged
in a debate with a then prominent socialist that under socialism no
literary expression of free thought would be practicable, and I cannot
do more than accentuate his lucid and unanswerable arguments. The state,
being controller of all the implements of production, a private press
would be as illegal as the dies used by a forger. Nobody could issue a
book, a newspaper, or even a leaflet, unless the use of a state press
were allowed him by the state authorities, together with the disposal of
the labour of the requisite number of compositors. Now, it is clear that
the state could not bind itself to put presses and compositors at the
service of every one of its citizens who was anxious to see himself in
print. There would have to be selection and rejection of some drastic
kind. The state would have to act as universal publisher's reader. What
would happen under these circumstances to purely imagi