from competition. Suppose, also,
there were no waste from business panics and crises through bankruptcy
and long interruptions of industry, and also none from the idleness of
capital and labor. Supposing these evils, which are essential to the
conduct of industry by capital in private hands, could all be
miraculously prevented, and the system yet retained; even then the
superiority of the results attained by the modern industrial system of
national control would remain overwhelming.

"You used to have some pretty large textile manufacturing
establishments, even in your day, although not comparable with ours. No
doubt you have visited these great mills in your time, covering acres
of ground, employing thousands of hands, and combining under one roof,
under one control, the hundred distinct processes between, say, the
cotton bale and the bale of glossy calicoes. You have admired the vast
economy of labor as of mechanical force resulting from the perfect
interworking with the rest of every wheel and every hand. No doubt you
have reflected how much less the same force of workers employed in that
factory would accomplish if they were scattered, each man working
independently. Would you think it an exaggeration to say that the
utmost product of those workers, working thus apart, however amicable
their relations might be, was increased not merely by a percentage, but
many fold, when their efforts were organized under one control? Well
now, Mr. West, the organization of the industry of the nation under a
single control, so that all its processes interlock, has multiplied the
total product over the utmost that could be done under the former
system, even leaving out of account the four great wastes mentioned, in
the same proportion that the product of those millworkers was increased
by cooperation. The effectiveness of the working force of a nation,
under the myriad-headed leadership of private capital, even if the
leaders were not mutual enemies, as compared with that which it attains
under a single head, may be likened to the military efficiency of a
mob, or a horde of barbarians with a thousand petty chiefs, as compared
with that of a disciplined army under one general--such a fighting
machine, for example, as the German army in the time of Von Moltke."

"After what you have told me," I said, "I do not so much wonder that
the nation is richer now than then, but that you are not all Croesuses."

"Well," replied Dr. Leete, "we