n its golden prime,
and which enabled it to silence criticism by an imposing spectacle of
material success. Though it still works, it works unevenly, amid
constant friction and jolts and stoppages, without the confidence of
the public and without full confidence even in itself, a tyrant who
must intrigue and cajole where formerly he commanded, a gaoler who, if
not yet {141} deprived of whip, dare only administer moderate
chastisement, and who, though he still protests that he alone can keep
the treadmill moving and get the corn ground, is compelled to surrender
so much of his authority as to make it questionable whether he is worth
his keep. For the instruments through which Capitalism exercised
discipline are one by one being taken from it. It cannot pay what
wages it likes or work what hours it likes. In well-organized
industries the power of arbitrary dismissal, the very center of its
authority, is being shaken, because men will no longer tolerate a
system which makes their livelihood dependent on the caprices of an
individual. In all industries alike the time is not far distant when
the dread of starvation can no longer be used to cow dissatisfied
workers into submission, because the public will no longer allow
involuntary unemployment to result in starvation.

And if Capitalism is losing its control of men's bodies, still more has
it lost its command of their minds. The product of a civilization
which regarded "the poor" as instruments, at worst of the luxuries, at
best of the virtues, of the rich, its psychological foundation fifty
years ago was an ignorance in the mass of mankind which led them to
reverence as wisdom the very follies of their masters, and an almost
animal incapacity for responsibility. Education and experience have
destroyed the passivity which was the condition of the perpetuation of
industrial government in the hands of an oligarchy of private
capitalists. The workman of to-day has as little belief in the
intellectual superiority of many of those who direct industry as he has
in the morality of {142} the system. It appears to him to be not only
oppressive, but wasteful, unintelligent and inefficient. In the light
of his own experience in the factory and the mine, he regards the claim
of the capitalist to be the self-appointed guardian of public interests
as a piece of sanctimonious hypocrisy. For he sees every day that
efficiency is sacrificed to shortsighted financial interests; and