§ 3.
Our visitor would not only be struck by the clogging of our social activities through this system of leaving everything to private enterprise; he would also be struck by the immense wastefulness. Everywhere he would see things in duplicate and triplicate; down the High Street of any small town he would find three or four butchers—mostly selling New Zealand mutton and Argentine beef as English—five or six grocers, three or four milk shops, one or two big drapers and three or four small haberdashers, milliners, and “fancy shops,” two or three fishmongers, all very poor, all rather bad, most of them in debt and with their assistants all insecure and underpaid. He would find in spite of this wealth of competition that every one who could contrive it, all the really prosperous people in fact, bought most of their food and drapery from big London firms.
But why should I go on writing fresh arguments when we have Elihu’s classic tract[4] to quote.
“Observe how private enterprise supplies the streets with milk. At 7.30 a milk cart comes lumbering along and delivers milk at one house and away again. Half-an-hour later another milk cart arrives and delivers milk, first on this side of the street and then on that, until seven houses have been supplied, and then he departs. During the next three or four hours four other milk carts put in an appearance at varying intervals, supplying a house here and another there, until finally, as it draws towards noon, their task is accomplished and the street supplied with milk.
“The time actually occupied by one and another of these distributors of milk makes in all about an hour and forty minutes, six men and six horses and carts being required for the purpose, and these equipages rattle along one after the other, all over the district, through the greater part of the day, in the same erratic and extraordinary manner.”