e under
state-industry; such progress would be slower, and would itself
partake of a routine character--a slow, continuous adjustment of the
mechanism of production and distribution to the slowly-changing needs
of the community.

Sec. 10. A most important misunderstanding of the line of industrial
development arises from a conviction that all production of wealth
embodied in matter tends to pass under the dominion of machinery, that
an increasing number of workers in the future will become
machine-tenders, and that the state-control of machine-industry would
bring the vast majority of individuals into the condition of official
machine-workers. This, however, is by no means a reasonable forecast.
In competitive machine-industry, although it is to the interest of the
individual business to "save" as much labour as possible, the play of
competition causes to be made and worked a much larger quantity of
machinery than is enough to maintain the current rate of consumption,
and thus keeps in the ranks of manufacture a much larger quantity of
labour than is socially necessary. Yet in a typical manufacturing
country like England statistics show that the proportion of the
working population engaged in machine manufactures is not increasing.
If, then, by the gradual elimination of competition in the
machine-industries, the quantity of machine-work were kept down to
the social requirements of the community's consumption, the proportion
of machine-workers would be less than it is, assuming the demand for
machine-made goods continued the same.

But what, it may be said, will become of the increasing proportion of
the workers not required by machinery? will they go to swell
indefinitely the ranks of distributors? Will the number of merchants,
jobbers, speculators, shopkeepers, agents: middlemen of various sorts,
grow without limit? Assuming that the work of distribution were left
to competitive enterprise, and that the quantity and quality of
consumption remained the same as now, this result would seem
necessarily to follow. The labour saved in manufacture would pass, as
it does now, to intensify the competition of the distributive trades
and to subdivide into needlessly small fragments the necessary but
limited amount of distributive work. But these assumptions are not
necessarily correct. If, as seems likely, the increased intensity of
competition forced the growth of strong monopolies in certain
departments of distribution, the