be developed in a natural and convenient manner. So,
too, the municipalities might publish, seek out, maintain and honour
writers and sell the books they produced, against each other all over
the world. It would be a matter of pride for authors still
unrecognized to go forth to the world with the arms of some great city
on their covers, and it would be a matter of pride for any city to
have its arms upon work become classic and immortal. So at least one
method of competition is possible in this matter....

[25] I visited Liverpool and Manchester the other day for
the first time in my life, and was delighted to find how the
inferiority of the local art galleries to those of Glasgow
rankled in people's minds.

This, however, is but one passing suggestion out of many
possibilities. But in all these issues of the intellectual life, it is
manifest that public ownership must be so contrived, and can be so
contrived as to avoid centralization and a control without
alternatives. Moreover, whatever public publishing is done, it must be
left open to any one to set up as an independent publisher or printer,
and to sell and advertise through the impartial public book and news
distributing organization.

I lay some stress upon this matter of book issuing because I think it
is a remarkable and regrettable thing about contemporary Socialist
discussion that it does not seem to be in the least alive to the great
public disadvantage of leaving this vitally important service to
private gain getting. Municipal coal, municipal milk, municipal house
owning, the Socialists seem prepared for, and even municipal theatres,
but municipal publication they still do not take into consideration.
They leave the capitalist free to contrive the control of their book
supply and to check and determine all the provender of their minds....

The problem of the press is perhaps to be solved by some parallel
combination of individual enterprise and public resources. All sorts
of things may happen to the newspaper of to-day even in the near
future, it cannot but be felt that in its present form it is an
extremely transitory phenomenon, that it no longer embodies and rules
public thought as it did in the middle and later Victorian period, and
that a separation of public discussion from the news sheet is already
in progress. Both in England and America the popular magazine seems
taking over an increasing share of the public thinking