to administer industry officially, the establishment of industrial order would be the death-blow to industrial progress. The strife, danger, and waste of industrial competition are necessary conditions to industrial vitality.
How much force do these objections contain in the light of the information provided by our study of industrial evolution? It should be recognised at the outset that the economic individualist is not a conservative, defending an established order and pointing out the dangers attending proposed innovations. Our analysis of the structure of modern industry shows the progressive socialisation of certain classes of industry as a step in the order of events, equally natural and necessary with the earlier steps by which machine-industry superseded handicraft and crystallised in ever larger masses with changing relations to one another. The indictment against social control over industry is an indictment against a natural order of events, on the ground that nature has taken a wrong road of advancement. It is only possible to regard the legislative action by which public control over industry is established as "unnatural" or "artificial" by excluding from "Nature" those social forces which find expression in Acts of Parliament, an eminently unscientific mode of reasoning.
But though this growing exercise of social control cannot be regarded as "fighting against the constitution of things,"[290] it may be considered by those who hold we have no guarantee of the future development of the human race, as one of the lines of action in which the advancing enfeeblement of man may express itself: the abandonment of individual strife in commerce may be regarded as a mark of diminishing vitality, which seeks immunity from effort and an equable condition of material comfort, in preference to the risks and excitement of a more eventful and arduous career. Order will be purchased at the price of progress: the abandonment of individual enterprise in industry is part of the decadence of humanity. This is the interpretation which Dr. Pearson, in his National Life and Character, places upon the socialistic tendencies of the age: the suppression of competitive industry in order to cure poverty, physical misery, and social injustice, will produce a society which is "sensuous, genial, fibreless." The validity of such a judgment rests upon two assumptions: first, that social control of industry necessarily crushes the spirit of individual enterprise and checks industrial progress; second, that extension of State control over capitalist industry necessarily implies a diminished scope of individual control in the production of wealth.
The first assumption is open to a number of criticisms which must be held to greatly modify its force, and which may be summarised as follows:--
(1) Much individual enterprise in industry does not make for industrial progress. A larger and larger proportion of the energy given out in trade competition is consumed in violent warfare between trade rivals, and is not represented either in advancement of industrial arts or in increase of material wealth.
(2) History does not show greed of gain as the motive of the great steps in industrial progress. The love of science, the pure delight of mechanical invention, the attainment of some slight personal convenience in labour, and mere chance, play the largest part in the history of industrial improvements. These motives would be as equally operative under state-control as under private enterprise.
(3) Such personal inducements as may supply a useful stimulus to the inventive faculty could be offered in socially-controlled industry, not merely publicity and honour, but such direct material rewards as were useful.