has taken place, it will probably be found that the necessary
provision for the government of industry will involve not merely the
freedom of the producers to produce, but the creation of machinery
through which the consumer, for whom he produces, can express his
wishes and criticize the way in which they are met, as at present he
normally cannot. But that is the second stage in the process of
reorganizing industry for the performance of function, not the first.
The first is to free it from subordination to the pecuniary interests
of the owner of property, because they are the magnetic pole which sets
all the compasses wrong, and which causes industry, however swiftly it
may progress, to progress in the wrong direction.

Nor does this change in the character of property involve a breach with
the existing order so sharp as to be impracticable. The phraseology of
political controversy continues to reproduce the conventional
antitheses of the early nineteenth century; "private enterprise" and
"public ownership" are still contrasted with each other as light with
darkness or darkness with light. But, in reality, behind the formal
shell of the traditional legal system the elements of a new body of
relationship have already been prepared, and find piece-meal
application through policies devised, not by socialists, but by men who
repeat the formulae of individualism, at the very moment when they are
undermining it. The Esch-Cummins Act in America, the {119} Act
establishing a Ministry of Transport in England, Sir Arthur Duckham's
scheme for the organization of the coal mines, the proposals with
regard to the coal industry of the British Government itself, appear to
have the common characteristic of retaining private ownership in name,
while attenuating it in fact, by placing its operators under the
supervision, accompanied sometimes by a financial guarantee, of a
public authority. Schemes of this general character appear, indeed, to
be the first instinctive reaction produced by the discovery that
private enterprise is no longer functioning effectively; it is probable
that they possess certain merits of a technical order analogous to
those associated with the amalgamation of competing firms into a single
combination. It is questionable, however, whether the compromise which
they represent is permanently tenable. What, after all, it may be
asked, are the advantages of private ownership when it has been pared
down to the po