isdom in the affairs of industry is, after all, what it
is in any other department of organized life. It is to consider the
end for which economic activity is carried on and then to adapt
economic organization to it. It is to pay for service and for service
only, and when capital is hired to make sure that it is hired at the
cheapest possible price. It is to place the responsibility for
organizing industry on the shoulders of those who work and use, not of
those who own, because production is the business of the producer and
the proper person to see that he discharges his business is the
consumer for whom, and not for the owner of property, it ought to be
carried on. Above all it is to insist that all industries shall be
conducted in complete publicity as to costs and profits, because
publicity ought to be the antiseptic both of economic and political
abuses, and no man can have confidence in his neighbor unless both work
in the light.

As far as property is concerned, such a policy would possess two edges.
On the one hand, it would aim at abolishing those forms of property in
which ownership is divorced from obligations. On the other hand, it
would seek to encourage those forms of economic organization under
which the worker, whether owner or not, is free to carry on his work
without sharing its control or its profits with the mere _rentier_.
Thus, if in certain {86} spheres it involved an extension of public
ownership, it would in others foster an extension of private property.
For it is not private ownership, but private ownership divorced from
work, which is corrupting to the principle of industry; and the idea of
some socialists that private property in land or capital is necessarily
mischievous is a piece of scholastic pedantry as absurd as that of
those conservatives who would invest all property with some kind of
mysterious sanctity. It all depends what sort of property it is and
for what purpose it is used. Provided that the State retains its
eminent domain, and controls alienation, as it does under the Homestead
laws of the Dominions, with sufficient stringency to prevent the
creation of a class of functionless property-owners, there is no
inconsistency between encouraging simultaneously a multiplication of
peasant farmers and small masters who own their own farms or shops, and
the abolition of private ownership in those industries, unfortunately
to-day the most conspicuous, in which the private owner i