5S8 INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



by workers; and the tacit assumption is that the required 

 payment will be, at first and always, much less than that 

 which is taken by the members of the directive organiza 

 tion now existing employers and their staffs; while sub 

 mission to the orders of these State-officials will be more 

 tolerable than submission to the orders of those who pay 

 wages for work. 



A complete parallelism exists between such a social struc 

 ture and the structure of an army. It is simply a civil 

 regimentation parallel to the military regimentation ; and it 

 establishes an industrial subordination parallel to the mili 

 tary subordination. In either case the rule is Do your task 

 and take your rations. In the working organization as in the 

 fighting organization, obedience is requisite for maintenance 

 of order, as well as for efficiency, and must be enforced with 

 whatever rigour is found needful. Doubtless in the one 

 case as in the other, multitudinous officers, grade over 

 grade, having in their hands all authority and all means of 

 coercion, would be able to curb that aggressive egoism, 

 illustrated above, which causes the failures of small social 

 istic bodies: idleness, carelessness, quarrels, violence, would 

 be prevented, and efficient work insisted upon. But when 

 from regulation of the workers by the bureaucracy we turn 

 to the bureaucracy itself, and ask how it is to be regulated, 

 there is no such satisfactory answer. Owning, in trust for 

 the community, all the land, the capital, the means of transit 

 and communication, as well as whatever police and military 

 force had to be maintained, this all-powerful official organi 

 zation, composed of men characterized on the average by an 

 aggressive egoism like that which the workers display, but 

 not like them under any higher control, must inevitably ad 

 vantage itself at the cost of the governed: the elective 

 powers of the governed having soon failed to prevent it; 

 since, as is perpetually shown, a large unorganized body can 

 not cope with a small organized one. Under such conditions 

 there would be an increasing deduction from the aggregate 



