ary to take count of the
risks involved in the inauguration of any public and social economical
systems which might tend to stifle freedom of thought and to
discourage the efforts of those who have suggestions of industrial
improvements to make.

It is plain that those economic forces which prevent the inventor from
having his ideas tested must to that extent retard the progress of
industrial improvement. Thousands of men, who imagine that they
possess the inventive talent in a highly developed degree, are either
crack-brained enthusiasts or else utterly unpractical men whose
services would never be worth anything at all in the work of
attacking difficult mechanical problems. It is in the task of
discriminating between this class and the true inventors that many
industrial organizers fail. Any economic system which offers
inducements to the directors of industrial enterprises to shirk the
onerous, and at times very irksome, duty of sifting out the good from
the bad must stand condemned not only on account of its wastefulness,
but by reason of its baneful effects in the discouragement of
inventive genius.

Considerations of this kind lead to the conclusion that during the
twentieth century the spread of collectivist or socialistic ideas, and
the adoption of methods of State and municipal control of production
and transport may have an important bearing upon the progress of
civilisation through the adoption of new inventions. Many thinking men
and women of the present generation are inclined to believe _the_
twentieth century invention _par excellence_ will be the bringing of
all the machinery of production, transport and exchange under the
official control of persons appointed by the State or by the
municipality, and therefore amenable to the vote of the people.
Projects of collectivism are in the air, and high hopes are
entertained that the twentieth century will be far more distinctively
marked by the revolution which it will witness in the social and
industrial organisation of the people than in the improvements
effected in the mechanical and other means for extending man's powers
over natural forces.

The average official naturally wishes to retain his billet. That is
the main motive which governs nearly all his official acts; and in the
treatment which he usually accords to the inventor he shows this
anxiety perhaps more clearly than in any other class of the actions of
his administration. He wants to make no m