ld not be too detailed, or
they defeat themselves. It would be better that, once fair standards
have been established, the professional organization should check
offenses against prices and quality than that it should be necessary
for the State to do so. The alternative to minute external supervision
is supervision from within by men who become imbued with the public
obligations of their trade in the very process of learning it. It is,
in short, professional in industry.

For this reason collectivism by itself is too simple a solution. Its
failure is likely to be that of other rationalist systems.

"Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand,
Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band."

If industrial reorganization is to be a living reality, and not merely
a plan upon paper, its aim must be to secure not only that industry is
carried on for the service of the public, but that it shall be carried
on with the active co-operation of the organizations of producers. But
co-operation involves responsibility, and responsibility involves
power. It is idle to expect that men will give their best to any
system which they do not trust, or that they will trust any system in
the control of which they do not share. Their ability to carry
professional obligations depends upon the power which they possess to
remove the obstacles which prevent those obligations from being
discharged, and upon their willingness, when they possess the power, to
use it.

{152}

Two causes appear to have hampered the committees which were
established in connection with coal mines during the war to increase
the output of coal. One was the reluctance of some of them to
discharge the invidious task of imposing penalties for absenteeism on
their fellow-workmen. The other was the exclusion of faults of
management from the control of many committees. In some cases all went
well till they demanded that, if the miners were penalized for
absenteeism which was due to them, the management should be penalized
similarly when men who desired to work were sent home because, as a
result of defective organization, there was no work for them to do.
Their demand was resisted as "interference with the management," and
the attempt to enforce regularity of attendance broke down. Nor, to
take another example from the same industry, is it to be expected that
the weight of the miners' organization will be thrown on to the side of
greater production, if it has no power to