istakes, but whether he ever
scores a distinct and decided success is comparatively a matter of
indifference to him. So long as he does not give a handle to his
enemies to be used against him, he is fairly contented to go on from
year to year in a humdrum style.

Even a man of fine feeling and progressive ideas soon experiences the
numbing effects of the routine life after he has been a few years in
office. He knows that he will be judged rather on the negative than on
the positive principle, that is to say, for the things which it is
accounted he ought not to have done rather than for the more
enterprising good things which it is admitted he may have done.

Now any one who undertakes to encourage invention must necessarily
make mistakes. He may indeed know that one case of brilliant success
will make up for half a dozen comparative failures; but he reckons
that at any rate the blanks in the chances which he is taking will
numerically exceed the prizes. An official, however, will not dare to
draw blanks. Better for him to draw nothing at all. He must therefore
turn his back upon the inventor and approve of nothing which has not
been shown to be a great success elsewhere.

This means that the socialised and municipalised enterprises must
always lag behind those depending upon private effort; and the country
which imposes disabilities on the latter must, for a time at least,
lose its lead in the industrial race. This is what happened to
England, as contrasted with the United States, when, under the
influence of enthusiasm for future municipalisation, the British
Legislature laid heavy penalties upon those who should venture to
instal electric trams in the United Kingdom.

The American manufacturers and tramway companies, in their keen
competition with one another and perfect freedom to compete on even
terms with horse traction, soon took the lead in all matters
pertaining to electric traction, and the British public, at the close
of the nineteenth century, have had to witness the humiliating
spectacle of their own public authorities being forced to import
electrical apparatus, and even steam-engines applicable to dynamos
used for tramway purposes, from the other side of the Atlantic!

The lesson thus enforced will not in the end be missed, although it
may require a considerable time to be fully understood. Officialism is
a foe to inventive progress; and whether it exists under a regime of
collectivism or under one o