Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/398

376 the art of war has not decayed. In a similar way the captains of industry are gradually being cleposecl from their independent com- mands, and turned into salaried servants of the public. Nearly all the railways of the world, outside of America and the United Kingdom, are managed in this way. The Belgian Government works its own line of passenger steamers. The Paris Municipal Council opens public bakeries. The Glasgow Town Council runs its own common locigrog-houses. Huclclersfielcl its own tramways. Everywhere, schools, water-works, gas-works, dwellings for the people, and many other forms of capital, are passing from incli- viclual into collective control. And there is no contrary move- ment. No community which has once ' municipalizecl ' any public service has ever retraced its steps or reversed its action. Such is the answer that is actually being given to this difiicty of Individualism. Everywhere the workman is combg to under- stand that it is practically hopeless for him, either individually or co-operatively, to own the constantly growing mass of capital by the use of which he lives. Either we must, under what Mr.' Courthey calls 'complete personal freedom,' acquiesce in the personal rule of the capitalist, tempered only by enlightened sel- interest and the ' gift of sympathy,' or we must substitute for it; as we did for the royal authority, the collective rule of the whole community. The decision, in these democratic days, is scarcely doubtful. And hence we have on all sides, what to the Indivi- dualist is the most incomprehensible of phenomena, the expansion of the sphere of government in the interests of liberty itself. Socialism is, indeed, nothing but the extension of democratic self-government from the political to the industrial world, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that it is an inevitable outcome of the joint effects of the economic and political revolutions of the past century. Individualists often take refuge in a faith that the extension' of the proprietary class, and the competition of' its members, will always furnish an adequate safeguard against the tyranny of any one of them. But the monopoly of which the democracy is here impatient is not that of any single individual, but that of the class itself. What the workers are obiecting to is, not the rise of any industrial Buonaparte financially domineering the whole earth--though American experience makes even this less ira- probable than it once was--but the creation of a kind of new feudal system of industry, the domination of the mass of ordinary workers by a hierarchy of property owners, who com- pete, it is true, among themselves, but who are nevertheless able,