capital, except for purposes specified
by Act of Parliament, should be abolished, and they should be free to
undertake such services as the citizens may desire. The objection to
public ownership, in so far as it is intelligent, is in reality largely
an objection to over-centralization. But the remedy for
over-centralization, is not the maintenance of functionless property in
private hands, but the decentralized ownership of public property, and
when Birmingham and Manchester and Leeds are the little republics which
they should be, there is no reason to anticipate that they will tremble
at a whisper from Whitehall.

These things should be done steadily and continuously quite apart from
the special cases like that of the mines and railways, where the
private ownership of capital is stated by the experts to have been
responsible for intolerable waste, or the manufacture of ornaments
[Transcriber's note: armaments?] and alcoholic liquor, which are
politically and socially too dangerous to be left in private hands.
They should be done not in order to establish a single form of
bureaucratic management, but in order to release the industry from the
domination of proprietary interests, which, whatever the form of
management, are not merely troublesome in detail but vicious in
principle, because they divert it from the performance of function to
the acquisition of gain. If at the same time private ownership is
shaken, as recently it has been, by action on the part of particular
groups of workers, so much the better. There are more ways of killing
a cat than {122} drowning it in cream, and it is all the more likely to
choose the cream if they are explained to it. But the two methods are
complementary, not alternative, and the attempt to found rival schools
on an imaginary incompatibility between them is a bad case of the
_odium sociologicum_ which afflicts reformers.

[1] Reprinted in _The Industrial Council for the Building Industry_.

[2] _Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence_, Vol. I, p. 2506.

{123}

VIII

THE "VICIOUS CIRCLE"

What form of management should replace the administration of industry
by the agents of shareholders? What is most likely to hold it to its
main purpose, and to be least at the mercy of predatory interests and
functionless supernumeraries, and of the alternations of sullen
dissatisfaction and spasmodic revolt which at present distract it?
Whatever the system upon which