f autocracy, it must paralyse industrial
enterprise to that extent, thus rendering the country which has
adopted it liable to be outstripped by its competitors.

The true friend of inventive progress is generally the rising
competitor in a busy hive of industry where the difficulties of
securing a profitable footing are very considerable. Such a man is
ever on the watch for an opportunity to gain some leverage by which he
may raise himself to a level with older-established or richer
competitors. If he be a good employer his workmen enter into the
spirit of the competition, feeling that promotion will follow on any
services they may render. They may perhaps possess the inventive
talent themselves, or they may do even greater services by recognising
it in others and co-operating in their work. It is thus that
successful inventions are usually started on their useful careers.

It is therefore upon private enterprise that the principal onus of
advancing the inventions which will contribute to the progress of the
human race in the twentieth century must necessarily fall. The type of
man who will cheerfully work _pro bono publico_, with just as much
ardour as he would exhibit when labouring to advance his own
interests, may already be found here and there in civilised
communities at existing stages of development; but it is not
sufficiently numerous to enable the world to dispense with the
powerful stimulus of competition.

Just as a superior type of machinery can be elaborated during the
course of a single century, there is no doubt that--mainly through the
use of improved appliances for lessening the amount of brute force
which man needs to exert in his daily avocations--the nervous
organisations of the men and women constituting the rank and file
during the latter part of the twentieth century will be immensely
improved in sensitiveness. A corresponding advance will then take
place in the capacity for collectivism. But a human being of the high
class demanded for the carrying out of any scheme of State socialism
must be bred by a slow improvement during successive generations. A
hundred years do not constitute a long period of time in the process
of the organic evolution of the human race, and, as Tennyson declared,

We are far from the noon of man--
There is time for the race to grow.

Yet the public advantages of collectivist activities in certain
particular directions cannot for a moment be denied. Much waste