int which policies of this order propose? May not the
"owner" whose rights they are designed to protect not unreasonably
reply to their authors, "Thank you for nothing"? Individual enterprise
has its merits: so also, perhaps, has public ownership. But, by the
time these schemes have done with it, not much remains of "the simple
and obvious system of natural liberty," while their inventors are
precluded from appealing to the motives which are emphasized by
advocates of nationalization. It is one thing to be an entrepreneur
with a world of adventure and unlimited profits--if they can be
achieved--before one. It is quite another to be a director of a
railway company or coal {120} corporation with a minimum rate of profit
guaranteed by the State, and a maximum rate of profit which cannot be
exceeded. Hybrids are apt to be sterile. It may be questioned
whether, in drawing the teeth of private capitalism, this type of
compromise does not draw out most of its virtues as well.

So, when a certain stage of economic development has been reached,
private ownership, by the admission of its defenders, can no longer be
tolerated in the only form in which it is free to display the
characteristic, and quite genuine, advantages for the sake of which it
used to be defended. And, as step by step it is whittled down by tacit
concessions to the practical necessity of protecting the consumer, or
eliminating waste, or meeting the claims of the workers, public
ownership becomes, not only on social grounds, but for reasons of
economic efficiency, the alternative to a type of private ownership
which appears to carry with it few rights of ownership and to be
singularly devoid of privacy. Inevitably and unfortunately the change
must be gradual. But it should be continuous. When, as in the last
few years, the State has acquired the ownership of great masses of
industrial capital, it should retain it, instead of surrendering it to
private capitalists, who protest at once that it will be managed so
inefficiently that it will not pay and managed so efficiently that it
will undersell them. When estates are being broken up and sold, as
they are at present, public bodies should enter the market and acquire
them. Most important of all, the ridiculous barrier, inherited from an
age in which municipal corporations were corrupt oligarchies, which
{121} at present prevents England's Local Authorities from acquiring
property in land and industrial