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.

Sec. 3. It must not, however, be supposed that the most thorough
transparency of industry, any more than the removal of the political
barriers which prevent Free Trade, would tend to bring about the
desirable adjustment between the healthy social organism and the
environment of machine-production. Full free trade would supply,
quicken, and facilitate the operation of those large economic forces
which we have seen at work: the tendency of capital to gravitate into
larger and fewer masses, localised where labour can be maintained upon
the most economical terms: a correspondent but slower and less
complete organisation of labour in large masses: the flow of labouring
population into towns, together with a larger utilisation of women and
(where permitted) children for industrial work: a growing keenness of
antagonism as the mass of the business-unit is larger, and an
increased expenditure of productive power upon aggressive commercial
warfare: the growth of monopolies springing from natural, social, or
economic sources, conferring upon individuals or classes the power to
consume without producing, and by their consumption to direct the
quantity and character of large masses of labour.

The complete realisation of full free trade in all directions has no
power whatever to abate the activity of these forces, and would only
serve to bring their operation into more signal and startling
prominence.

For the waste of periodic over-production visible in trade depression,
for the sufferings caused by ever larger oscillations in prices and
greater irregularity of employment of capital and labour, for the
specific evils of long hours or excessive intensity of labour,
dangerous and unwholesome conditions of employment, increased
employment of women and children, and growth of large-city life,
freedom of trade conjoined with publicity of business operations can
furnish no remedies.

It has been seen that these injuries to individuals and groups of
individuals, and through them to society, arise naturally and
necessarily