and
heavy loss are entailed by the duplication of works of general utility
by rival owners, each of them, perhaps, only half utilising the full
capacities of his machinery or of the other plant upon which capital
has been expended.

Moreover, as soon as companies have become so large that their
managers and other officials are brought into no closer personal
relations with the shareholders than the town clerks, engineers, and
surveyors of cities, and the departmental heads of State bureaus are
associated with the voters and ratepayers, the systems of private and
of collective ownership begin to stand much more nearly on a par as
regards the non-encouragement which they offer to inventiveness.

One of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century, therefore,
will be the adoption of a _via media_ which will admit of the
progressiveness of private ownership in promoting industrial
inventions, combined with the political progressiveness of
collectivism. One direction in which an important factor assisting in
the solution of this problem is to be expected is in the removal of
the causes which tend to make public officials so timid and
unprogressive.

So long as a mere temporary outcry about the apparent non-success of
some adopted improvement--whose real value perhaps cannot be proved
unless by the exercise of patience--may result in the dismissal or in
the disrating of the official who has recommended it, just so long
will all those who are called upon to act as guides to public
enterprises be compelled to stick to the most conservative lines in
the exercise of their duties. More assurance of permanence in
positions of public administration is needed.

The man upon whose shoulders rests the responsibility of adopting, or
of condemning, new proposals brought before him, ostensibly in the
interests of the public welfare, ought to be regarded as being called
upon to carry out _quasi_-judicial functions; and his tenure of
office, and his claim to a pension after a busy career, ought not to
depend upon the chances of the evanescent politics of the day. If a
man has proved, by his close and successful application to the study
of his profession--as evinced in the tests which he has passed as a
youth and during his subsequent career in subordinate positions--that
he is really a lover of hard work, and imbued with conscientious
devotion to duty, he may generally be trusted, when he has attained to
a position of superintend