t of the London County Council's steamboats,
the efficiency of labour is so lessened by incompetent direction that
the labourers employed can only perform for society one-half of the
services which society must perform for them. For every hour which they
spend in conveying ten men on the river, twenty men must work to provide
them with food and clothing. So long as fortunes are unequal, and depend
on individual effort and enterprise, such losses may be localised and
obscured in a hundred different ways; but the moment all fortunes, as
they would be under the regime of socialism, were reduced to specific
fractions of the aggregate product of the community, any decline in the
efficiency of the labour of any single group would result in a
diminution of the income of every member of all the others. Wherever ten
men were employed to do what might have been done by nine, the
contribution to the general stock would be less by ten per cent. than it
might have been. If ten men were employed in making chairs, which might
have been made by nine had their labour been better directed, the
community would lose the cushions which in that case would have been
made by the tenth. And what holds good of labour in respect of its
productive efficiency holds good of it also in respect of the character
of the goods produced. If ten men were employed in producing forty
loaves when all that could be eaten was twenty, not only would the
remaining twenty be wasted, but the community would lose the butter
which might have been made instead of them. The importance, therefore,
to the community as a whole of having every branch of its labour
directed by those men, and by those men only, whose ability would raise
it to the highest pitch of efficiency, and cause it to produce only such
goods and such quantities of them as would satisfy from moment to moment
the needs and tastes of the population, would, under a regime of
socialism, be even more general and immediate than it is at the present
day; and yet at the same time, for reasons to which we will now return,
the difficulty of securing the requisite ability would be increased.

It is impossible to illustrate in detail the situation which would thus
arise; for the state, as sole capitalist and sole director of labour, is
an institution which imaginably might take various forms; and
socialists, in this case exhibiting a commendable prudence, have
refrained from committing themselves to any detailed pro