ed, but of shareholders, whose primary aim
is dividends, and to whom all production, however futile or frivolous,
so long as it yields dividends, is the same. It is useless to urge
that he should produce more wealth for the {137} community, unless at
the same time he is assured that it is the community which will benefit
in proportion as more wealth is produced. If every unnecessary charge
upon coal-getting had been eliminated, it would be reasonable that the
miners should set a much needed example by refusing to extort better
terms for themselves at the expense of the public. But there is no
reason why they should work for lower wages or longer hours as long as
those who are to-day responsible for the management of the industry
conduct it with "the extravagance and waste" stigmatized by the most
eminent official witness before the Coal Commission, or why the
consumer should grumble at the rapacity of the miner as long as he
allows himself to be mulcted by swollen profits, the costs of an
ineffective organization, and unnecessary payments to superfluous
middlemen.

If to-day the miner or any other workman produces more, he has no
guarantee that the result will be lower prices rather than higher
dividends and larger royalties, any more than, as a workman, he can
determine the quality of the wares which his employer supplies to
customers, or the price at which they are sold. Nor, as long as he is
directly the servant of a profit-making company, and only indirectly
the servant of the community, can any such guarantee be offered him.
It can be offered only in so far as he stands in an immediate and
direct relation to the public for whom industry is carried on, so that,
when all costs have been met, any surplus will pass to it, and not to
private individuals. It will be accepted only in so far as the workers
in each industry are not merely servants executing orders, but {138}
themselves have a collective responsibility for the character of the
service, and can use their organizations not merely to protect
themselves against exploitation, but to make positive contributions to
the administration and development of their industry.

[1] _Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence_, pp. 9261-9.

{139}

IX

THE CONDITION OF EFFICIENCY

Thus it is not only for the sake of the producers, on whom the old
industrial order weighed most heavily, that a new industrial order is
needed. It is needed for the sake