cate puzzle in reconciling the
indisputable need for untrammelled individual expression on the one
hand with public ownership on the other, and also with the difficult
riddle how authors may be supported under Socialist conditions. It is
not within the design of this book to do more than indicate a possible
solution. These are problems the Socialist has still to work out. At
present authors with business shrewdness and the ability to be
interesting get an income from the sale of their books, and it seems
possible that they might continue to be paid in that way under
Socialism. It is difficult outside the field of specialist work (which
under any social system has to be endowed in relation to colleges and
universities) to find any other just way of discriminating between the
author who ought to get a living from writing, and the author who has
no reasonable claim to do so. But under Socialism, in addition to the
private publisher or altogether replacing him, there will have to be
some sort of public publisher.

Here again difficulties arise. It is difficult to see how, if there is
only one general State publishing department, a sort of censorship can
be altogether avoided, and even if, for example, one insists upon the
right of every one who cares to pay for it to have matter printed,
bound and issued by the public presses and binders, it still leaves a
disagreeable possibility of uniformity haunting the mind. But the
whole trend of administrative Socialism is towards a conception of
great local governments, of land, elementary education,
omnibus-transit, power distribution and the like, vesting in the hands
of municipalities as great as mediaeval principalities; and it seems
possible to look to these great bodies and to the municipal patriotism
and inter-municipal rivalries that will develop about them, for just
that spirited and competitive publishing that is desirable, just as
one looks now to their rivalries as a stimulus for art and
architecture and public dignity and display.[25] Already, as I have
pointed out in a previous chapter (Chapter IX., Sec. 5), the decorative
arts had to be rescued from the degrading influence of private
enterprise; no one wants to go back now to the early Victorian state
of affairs, and so it is reasonable to hope that out of the municipal
art and technical schools, which teach printing, binding and the like,
public presses, public binderies and all the machinery of book
production may