e and private profit-seeking. But
having committed himself to these two entirely unsound assumptions, it
is easy for Mr. Lever to show that since Socialism will give no more
wealth, and since what he calls Labour, Capital and the Employer (_i.e._
Labour, Plant and Management) are necessary to production and must
be maintained out of the total product, there will be little more,
practically, for the Labourer under Socialist conditions than under
the existing _regime_. Going on further to assume that the Owner is
always enterprising and intelligent and public-spirited, and the State
stupid (which is a quite unjustifiable assumption), he shows their
share may even be less. But the whole case for the Socialist
proposals, the student must bear in mind, rests upon the recognition
that private management of our collective concerns means chaotic and
socially wasteful management--however efficient it may be in
individual cases for competitive purposes--and that the systematic
abolition of the parasitic Owner from our economic process implies the
replacement of confusion by order and an immense increase in the
efficiency of that economic process. Socialism is economy. If the
student of Socialism does not bear this in mind, if once he allows the
assumption to creep in that Socialism is not so much a proposal to
change, concentrate and organize the economic process, as one to
distribute the existing wealth of the country in some new manner, he
will find there is a bad case for Socialism.

It is an amusing and I think a fair comment on the arguments of Mr.
Lever that a year or so ago he was actually concerned--no doubt in the
interests of the public as well as his own--in organizing the
production and distribution of soap so as to economize the waste and
avoid the public disservice due to the extreme competition of the soap
dealers. He wanted to do in the soap industry just exactly what
Socialism wants to do in the case of all public services, that is to
say he wanted to give it the economic advantages of a Great Combine.
In some directions the saving to the soap interest would have been
immense; all the vast expenditure upon newspaper advertisements, for
example, all the waste upon competing travellers would have been
saved. Whether the public would have benefited greatly or not is
beside the present question; Mr. Lever and other great soap
proprietors would certainly have benefited enormously. They would have
benefited by working