native literature
we need not here inquire; but when the question was one of expressing
controversial opinions as to science, religion, morals, and especially
social politics, what would happen is evident. The state would be able
to refuse, and it could not do otherwise than refuse, to print anything
which expressed opinions out of harmony with those which were
predominant among its own members. In so far as these members reflected
the opinions of the majority, they would never publish an attack on
errors which they themselves accepted as vital truths. In so far as they
owed their positions to certain real or supposed superiorities they
would never publish any criticism of their own methods by men whom they
would necessarily regard as mischievous and mistaken inferiors. In
short, whether the state acted in this matter as the ultra-superior
person, or as the ultra-popular person, the result would be just the
same. The focalised prejudices of the majority, or the privileged
self-confidence of a certain select minority, would deprive independent
thought in any other quarter of any means of expressing itself either by
book or journal, and by thus depriving it of its voice would place it at
an artificial disadvantage more effectual as a means of repression than
the dungeons of the Inquisition itself. It would be checked as
completely as the higher criticism of the Bible would have been if the
only printer in the whole world were the Pope and the only publishing
business were managed by the College of Cardinals.

And what, under a regime of socialism, would be true of human thought,
a-seeking to embody itself in printed books or newspapers, would be
equally true of it as applied to the methods of industry, and seeking to
embody itself in multiplied or improved commodities.

Such, then, are the disadvantages which socialism, as contrasted with
the existing system, would introduce in connection with the problem of
how to detect, and how, having detected it, to invest with suitable
powers, the men whose ability is, at any given moment, calculated to
raise labour to the highest pitch of productiveness--how to give power
to these, and to take it away from others in exact proportion as their
talents, as exhibited in its practical results, fall short of the
maximum which is at the time obtainable.

This problem, as we have seen already, the existing system solves by its
machinery of private competition, and of independent capitals