r and in what way the freedom of
private enterprise needs to be limited or curtailed for the common good.
We must solve that problem. For Liberals there is no inherent sanctity
in the conceptions of private property, or of private enterprise. They
will survive, and we can support them only so long as they appear to
work better in the public interest than any possible alternatives.

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

My object, then, is to show how a system which embodies a large amount
of private enterprise can be made tolerable and acceptable to modern
ideas of equity. For this purpose we need to consider (1) what have we
done in that direction in the past? (2) what is the setting of the
economic problem to-day, and (3) what is to be our policy for the
future?

Dealing first with wealth and wages, the whole field of social
legislation has a bearing upon them, including particularly education,
elementary and technical, the Factory Acts, and a great mass of
legislation which has affected the earning powers of the worker and the
conditions under which he labours. Just before the war we had come to
the point of fixing a minimum wage in the mines, but an even more
important factor was that we had introduced the Trade Board system,
which had begun to impose a minimum wage in certain trades where wages
were particularly low. But the most important direct attack upon the
unequal distribution of wealth was by taxation in accordance with the
Liberal policy of a graduated and differential income-tax, and still
more important by taxes upon inheritance; for it has long been
recognised that though it may be desirable to allow men to accumulate
great wealth during their lifetime, it by no means follows that they
should be entitled to control the distribution of wealth in the next
generation and launch their children on the world with a great advantage
over their fellows of which they may be quite unworthy. On the question
of insecurity it cannot be said that any serious attack has been made on
the problem of how to diminish fluctuations of trade, but again the
Liberal solution for dealing with that difficulty was to remedy not the
cause but its effects by insurance.

On the question of monopolies and exploitation, though we hear a great
deal of the growth of capitalistic organisation, in fact we find that,
of the three greatest industrial countries in the world, Great Britain
is the least trust-ridden, mainly because of its free trade sy