industry is administered, one thing is
certain. Its economic processes and results must be public, because
only if they are public can it be known whether the service of industry
is vigilant, effective and honorable, whether its purpose is being
realized and its function carried out. The defense of secrecy in
business resembles the defense of adulteration on the ground that it is
a legitimate weapon of competition; indeed it has even less
justification than that famous doctrine, for the condition of effective
competition is publicity, and one motive for secrecy is to prevent it.

Those who conduct industry at the present time and who are most
emphatic that, as the Duke of Wellington said of the unreformed House
of Commons, they "have never read or heard of any measure up to the
present moment which can in any degree satisfy the mind" that the
method of conducting it can in any way be improved, are also those
apparently who, with some {124} honorable exceptions, are most
reluctant that the full facts about it should be known. And it is
crucial that they should be known. It is crucial not only because, in
the present ignorance of the real economic situation, all industrial
disagreements tend inevitably to be battles in the dark, in which
"ignorant armies clash by night," but because, unless there is complete
publicity as to profits and costs, it is impossible to form any
judgment either of the reasonableness of the prices which are charged
or of the claims to remuneration of the different parties engaged in
production. For balance sheets, with their opportunities for
concealing profits, give no clear light upon the first, and no light at
all upon the second. And so, when the facts come out, the public is
aghast at revelations which show that industry is conducted with
bewildering financial extravagance. If the full facts had been
published, as they should have been, quarter by quarter, these
revelations would probably not have been made at all, because publicity
itself would have been an antiseptic and there would have been nothing
sensational to reveal.

The events of the last few years are a lesson which should need no
repetition. The Government, surprised at the price charged for making
shells at a time when its soldiers were ordered by Headquarters not to
fire more than a few rounds per day, whatever the need for retaliation,
because there were not more than a few to fire, establishes a costing
department t