36 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



ing on their own representation within the body 

 politic a kind of industrial democracy gradually 

 supplementing and superseding political democracy. 

 But on the other side we see labour closing for 

 battle with a vision which it has fixed far beyond 

 this horizon. It sweeps away almost without 

 parley the case put against it. The financial re- 

 publics of joint-stock enterprise, it asserts, have 

 no counterpart in political democracy. They 

 manage public utilities on a scale so great that their 

 affairs are comparable only to the affairs of a first- 

 class state or a federation of states. But they 

 outrage the fundamental principles of democracy, 

 labour asserts, in that they have no relation to 

 any social or moral principle outside the earning 

 of dividends ; while they violate the cardinal 

 necessity of democracy in that voting power is 

 according to the amount of shares held, and that 

 control is in the hands of the few who work in the 

 dark, the vastest returns being obtained by the arti- 

 ficial raising and depressing of the Stock Exchange 

 value of their securities. Labour does not stay to 

 argue with the overlords of capital the case for the 

 wages of capacity in this direction. The gigantic 

 growth of speculation in Stock Exchange values and 

 the vast system of finance which accompanies it 

 have come to be described as parasitic on modern 



