f "restriction of output" mean except
that they have failed to organize industry so as to secure the
efficient service which it is their special function to provide? Nor
is it appropriate to the situation to indulge in full-blooded
denunciations of the "selfishness" of the working classes. "To draw an
indictment against a whole nation" is a procedure which is as
impossible in industry as it is in politics. Institutions must be
adapted to human nature, not {144} human nature to institutions. If
the effect of the industrial system is such that a large and increasing
number of ordinary men and women find that it offers them no adequate
motive for economic effort, it is mere pedantry to denounce men and
women instead of amending the system.

Thus the time has come when absolutism in industry may still win its
battles, but loses the campaign, and loses it on the very ground of
economic efficiency which was of its own selection. In the period of
transition, while economic activity is distracted by the struggle
between those who have the name and habit of power, but no longer the
full reality of it, and those who are daily winning more of the reality
of power but are not yet its recognized repositories, it is the
consumer who suffers. He has neither the service of docile obedience,
nor the service of intelligent co-operation. For slavery will work--as
long as the slaves will let it; and freedom will work when men have
learned to be free; but what will not work is a combination of the two.
So the public goes short of coal not only because of the technical
deficiencies of the system under which it is raised and distributed,
but because the system itself has lost its driving force--because the
coal owners can no longer persuade the miners into producing more
dividends for them and more royalties for the owners of minerals, while
the public cannot appeal to them to put their whole power into serving
itself, because it has chosen that they should be the servants, not of
itself, but of shareholders.

And, this dilemma is not, as some suppose, temporary, {145} the
aftermath of war, or peculiar to the coal industry, as though the
miners alone were the children of sin which in the last few months they
have been described to be. It is permanent; it has spread far; and, as
sleeping spirits are stirred into life by education and one industry
after another develops a strong corporate consciousness, it will spread
further. Nor wi