e." And
this is true all up and down the social scale. A bricklayer is no good
unless he can be interested in laying bricks. One knows whenever a
domestic servant becomes mercenary, when she ceases to take, as people
say, "a pride in her work," and thinks only of "tips" and getting, she
becomes impossible. Does a signalman every time he pulls over a lever,
or a groom galloping a horse, think of his wages,--or want to?

I will confess I find it hard to write with any patience and civility
of this argument that humanity will not work except for greed or need
of money and only in proportion to the getting. It is so patently
absurd. I suppose the reasonable Anti-Socialist will hardly maintain
it seriously with that crudity. He will qualify. He will say that
although it may be true that good work is always done for the interest
of the doing or in the spirit of service, yet in order to get and keep
people at work, and to keep the standard high through periods of
indolence and distraction, there must be the dread of dismissal and
the stimulating eye of the owner. That certainly puts the case a good
deal less basely and much more plausibly.

There is, perhaps, this much truth in that, that most people do need a
certain stimulus to exertion and a certain standard of achievement to
do their best, but to say that this is provided by private ownership
and can only be provided by private ownership is an altogether
different thing. Is the British Telephone Service, for example, kept
as efficient as it is--which isn't very much, by the bye, in the way
of efficiency--by the protests of the shareholders or of the
subscribers? Does the grocer's errand-boy loiter any less than his
brother who carries the Post Office telegrams? In the matter of the
public milk supply, again, would not an intelligently critical public
anxious for its milk good and early be a far more formidable master
than a speculative proprietor in the back room of a creamery? And when
one comes to large business organizations managed by officials and
owned by dispersed shareholders, the contrast is all to the advantage
of the community.

No! the only proper virtues in work, the virtues that must be relied
upon, and developed and rewarded in the civilized State we Socialists
are seeking to bring about, are the spirit of service and the passion
for doing well, the honourable competition not to get but to _do_. By
sweating and debasing urgency, we get meagrely done what