by
the members of the industry itself--the actual producers, whether by
hand or brain, and to bring them into co-operation with the State as
the central representative of the community whom they are organized to
serve." Instead of unlimited profits, so "indispensable as an
incentive to efficiency," the employer is to be paid a salary for his
services as manager, and a rate of interest on his capital which is to
be both fixed and (unless he fails to earn it through his own
inefficiency) guaranteed; anything in excess of it, any "profits" in
fact, which in other industries are distributed as dividends to
shareholders, he is to {108} surrender to a central fund to be
administered by employers and workmen for the benefit of the industry
as a whole. Instead of the financial standing of each firm being
treated as an inscrutable mystery to the public, with the result that
it is sometimes a mystery to itself, there is to be a system of public
costing and audit, on the basis of which the industry will assume a
collective liability for those firms which are shown to be competently
managed. Instead of the workers being dismissed in slack times to
struggle along as best they can, they are to be maintained from a fund
raised by a levy on employers and administered by the trade unions.
There is to be publicity as to costs and profits, open dealing and
honest work and mutual helpfulness, instead of the competition which
the nineteenth century regarded as an efficient substitute for them.
"Capital" is not to "employ labor." Labor, which includes managerial
labor, is to employ capital; and to employ it at the cheapest rate at
which, in the circumstances of the trade, it can be got. If it employs
it so successfully that there is a surplus when it has been fairly paid
for its own services, then that surplus is not to be divided among
shareholders, for, when they have been paid interest, they have been
paid their due; it is to be used to equip the industry to provide still
more effective service in the future.

So here we have the majority of a body of practical men, who care
nothing for socialist theories, proposing to establish "organized
Public Service in the Building Industry," recommending, in short, that
their industry shall be turned into a profession. And they do it, it
{109} will be observed, by just that functional organization, just that
conversion of full proprietary rights into a mortgage secured (as far
as efficient fi