lity the municipally managed undertakings which,
rightly considered, belong to the stockholders, and would at the same
time ruin the capitalists who have advanced the money for acquiring
those undertakings. The Socialist policy would triumph. This would be
the fitting end of a rule by irresponsible and penniless demagogues.

To the Socialist there is no limit to municipal enterprise. Not some
branches of private trade and production, but all private trade and
production are to be taken over by the municipalities. Private
enterprise is to be extinguished altogether. The municipalities are to
be universal owners, manufacturers, and providers. Among the first
things which Socialist municipalities wish to control are the supply
of bread, milk, coal; hospitals and public-houses, banks, fire
insurances, and pawnshops.[686]

All workers are to be municipal officials. Stretching out beyond their
borders, the municipalities are ultimately to absorb the country, and
to bring it under Socialist management and government.[687]

Some of the more immediate aims of Socialism as regards London are
expressed by Sydney Webb, the brilliant, but unfortunately somewhat
over-imaginative, leader of British scientific Socialism, as follows:

"We see in imagination the County Council's aqueducts supplying London
with pure soft water from a Welsh lake; the County Council's mains
furnishing, without special charge, a constant supply up to the top of
every house: the County Council's hydrants and standpipes yielding
abundant cleansing fluid from the Thames to every street. When every
parish has its public baths and washhouses open without fees, every
Board school its swimming-bath and teacher of swimming, every railway
station and public building its drinking-fountain and basin for
washing the hands, every park its bathing and skating ponds--then we
shall begin to show the world that we do not, after all, fall behind
Imperial Rome in this one item of its splendid magnificence. By that
time the landlord will be required, as a mere condition of sanitary
fitness, to lay on water to every floor, if not to every tenement, and
the bath will be as common an adjunct of the workman's home as it now
is of the modern villa residence. And just as in some American cities
hot water and superheated steam are supplied in pipes for warming
purposes over large areas, we may even see the County Council laying
on a separate service of hot water to be drawn at will