Two forms which the industrial state under socialism might conceivably take: The official directors of industry might be either an autocratic bureaucracy, or they might else be subject to elected politicians representing the knowledge and opinions prevalent among the majority.
Estimate of the results which would arise in the former case. Illustrations from actual bureaucratic enterprise.
Estimate of the results which would arise in the latter case. The state, as representing the average opinion of the masses, brought to bear on scientific industrial enterprise. Illustrations.
The state as sole printer and publisher. State capitalism would destroy the machinery of industrial progress just as it would destroy the machinery by which thought and knowledge develop.
But behind the question of whether socialism could provide ability with the conditions or the machinery requisite for its exercise is the question of whether it could provide it with any adequate stimulus.
THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY.
SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT
Mr. Sidney Webb, and most modern socialists of the higher kind, recognise that this problem of motive underlies all others.
They approach it indirectly by sociological arguments borrowed from other philosophers, and directly by a psychology peculiar to themselves.
The sociological arguments by which socialists seek to minimise the claims of the able man.
These founded on a specific confusion of thought, which vitiated the evolutionary sociology of that second half of the nineteenth century. Illustrations from Herbert Spencer, Macaulay, Mr. Kidd, and recent socialists.