hey have come too near succeeding.
If the financial adviser to the Coal Controller may be trusted, the
shareholders in coal mines would appear to have done fairly well during
the war. But the proposal to limit their profits to 1/2 per ton is
described by Lord Gainford as "sheer robbery and confiscation." With
some honorable exceptions, what is demanded is that in the future as in
the past the directors of industry should be free to handle it as an
enterprise conducted for their own convenience or advancement, instead
of being compelled, as they have been partially compelled during the
war, to subordinate it to a social purpose. For to admit that the
criterion of commerce and industry is its success in discharging a
social purpose is at once to turn property and economic activity from
rights which are absolute into rights which are contingent and
derivative, because it is to affirm that they are relative to functions
and that they may justly be revoked when the functions are not
performed. It is, in short, to imply that property and economic
activity exist to promote the ends of society, whereas hitherto society
has been regarded in the world of business as existing to promote them.
To those who hold their position, not as functionaries, but by virtue
of their success in making industry contribute to their own wealth and
social influence, such a reversal of means and ends appears little less
than a revolution. For it means that they must justify before a social
tribunal {27} rights which they have hitherto taken for granted as part
of an order which is above criticism.

During the greater part of the nineteenth century the significance of
the opposition between the two principles of individual rights and
social functions was masked by the doctrine of the inevitable harmony
between private interests and public good. Competition, it was argued,
was an effective substitute for honesty. To-day that subsidiary
doctrine has fallen to pieces under criticism; few now would profess
adherence to the compound of economic optimism and moral bankruptcy
which led a nineteenth century economist to say: "Greed is held in
check by greed, and the desire for gain sets limits to itself." The
disposition to regard individual rights as the center and pivot of
society is still, however, the most powerful element in political
thought and the practical foundation of industrial organization. The
laborious refutation of the doctrine that