nt case necessarily centers, and which must
be counted on to give the outcome. Latterly the case is clearing up a
little further, on further experience and under further pressure of
technological exigencies, to the effect that financial arrangements are
indispensable in this connection only because and in so far as it has
been arranged to consider them indispensable; as in international trade.
They are an indispensable means of intermediation only in so far as
pecuniary interests are to be furthered or safeguarded in the
intermediation. When, as has happened with the belligerents in the
present instance, the national establishment becomes substantially
insolvent, it is beginning to appear that its affairs can be taken care
of with less difficulty and with better effect without the use of
financial expedients. Of course, it takes time to get used to doing
things by the more direct method and without the accustomed
circumlocution of accountancy, or the accustomed allowance for profits
to go to interested parties who, under the financial regime, hold a
power of discretionary permission in all matters that touch the use of
the industrial arts. Under these urgent material exigencies, investment
comes to have much of the appearance of a gratuitous drag and drain on
the processes of industry.

Here, again, is a sinister contingency; sinister, that is, for those
vested rights of ownership by force of which the owners of "capital" are
enabled to permit or withhold the use of the industrial arts by the
community at large, on pain of privation in case the accustomed toll to
the owners of capital is not paid. It is, of course, not intended to
find fault with this arrangement; which has the sanction of "time
immemorial" and of a settled persuasion that it lies at the root of all
civilised life and intercourse. It is only that in case of extreme need
this presumed indispensable expedient of industrial control has broken
down, and that experience is proving it to be, in these premises, an
item of borrowed trouble. Should experience continue to run on the same
lines for an appreciable period and at a high tension, it is at least
conceivable that the vested right of owners to employ unlimited sabotage
in the quest of profits might fall so far into disrepute as to leave
them under a qualified doubt on the return of "normal" conditions. The
common man, in other words, who gathers nothing but privation and
anxiety from the owners' discreti