1 7 2 



ARISTO CRA CY AND E VOL UT2ON 



Book ii 



competition 

 employers, 



system that 



permits of 



progress, 



but since the 



reintroduction 



of slavery is 



, we 



system 



capitalists which socialists so furiously denounce, 

 is that whilst the capitalists obtain control over 

 labour by means of wages, which control, by a 

 natural and automatic process, is gradually extin- 

 guished unless it is used efficiently, the competitors 

 for office under socialism would obtain the same 

 control by compulsory powers with which the State 

 would invest them, and which they would lose or 

 retain at the pleasure of some more or less arbitrary 

 authority. 



Competition, then, between the directors of 

 labour or, as it is here defined, the struggle for 

 industrial domination is as much a part of the 

 theoretical regime of socialism as it is a part of 



L 



the actual regime of capitalism. The only differences 

 between the two consist, firstly, in the means by 

 which labour is directed, coercion being employed 

 in one case, and in the other the inducement of 

 wages ; and, secondly, in the means by which the 

 fittest director is placed in power, and the less fit 

 deprived of it an official body deciding the matter 

 in the one case, and the mass of the consuming 

 public deciding it in the other for themselves. 



Now we may safely say that the regime of 



. , . . . , 11-111 



industrial coercion, or slavery, even though it should 

 bear the name of socialism, is not in these days 

 possible. It is impossible for two reasons one, 

 fa^ fa [ s O ut of harmony with the sentiments of the 

 modern world ; and the other equally strong, 

 though not so generally avowed that it is an 

 exceedingly clumsy and wasteful instrument of 



