HKB
industry, upon the existing basis of individual initiative and control, the reforms which are desirable must be considered as contributing to the more complete establishment of "free" competition in industry.
The complete breakdown of all barriers which impede the free flow of commerce and the migration of capital and labour, the fullest and widest dissemination of industrial information, are necessary to the attainment of the individualistic ideal of free trade. Perfect transparency of industrial operations, perfect fluidity of labour and of wealth would effect incalculably great economies in the production of commercial wealth. The free-trader, in his concentration upon the achievement of the latter economy, has generally failed to do full justice to the importance of the former. He has indeed to some limited extent recognised the value of accurate and extended industrial information as the intellectual basis of free trade. But, in common with most economists, he has failed to carry this consideration far enough. It is generally admitted that the increased publication of accounts and quotations of stock, springing out of the extension of joint-stock enterprise, the growth of numerous trade journals, the collection and dissemination of industrial facts by government bureaux and private statisticians, are serviceable in many ways. But the extreme repugnance which is shown towards all endeavours to extend the compulsory powers of acquiring information by the state, the extreme jealousy with which the rights of private information are maintained, show how inadequately the true character of modern industry is grasped. In the complexity of modern commerce it should be recognised that there is no such thing as a "self-regarding" or a private action. No fact bearing on prices, wages, profits, methods of production, etc., concerns a single firm or a single body of workers. Every industrial action, however detailed in character, however secretly conducted, has a public import, and necessarily affects the actions and interests of innumerable persons. Indeed it is often precisely in the knowledge of those matters regarded as most private, and most carefully secreted, that the public interest chiefly lies. Yet so firmly rooted in the business mind is the individualistic conception of industry, that any idea of a public development of those important private facts upon which the credit of a particular firm is based, would appear to destroy the very foundation of the commercial fabric. But, although in the game of commerce a single firm which played its hand openly while others kept theirs well concealed might suffer failure, it is quite evident that the whole community interested in the game would gain immensely if all the hands were on the table. Many, if not most, of the great disasters of modern commercial societies are attributable precisely to the fact that the credit of great business firms, which is pre-eminently an affair of public interest, is regarded as purely private before the crash. As industry grows more and more complex, so the interest of the public and of an ever-wider public in every industrial action grows apace, and a correspondingly growing recognition of this public interest, with provision for its security, will be found necessary. So far as the natural changes of industrial structure in the private business fail to provide the requisite publicity, the exercise of direct public scrutiny must come to be enforced. The reluctance shown alike by bodies of employers and of workers to divulge material facts is in large measure due to the false ideas they have conceived as to the nature of industrial activity, which education can do something to remove, but which, if not removed, must be over-ruled in the public interest.