TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 873 
and any arrest of this mobility involves a corresponding set-back in the advance- 
ment of the economic condition of mankind. It is a necessary consequence 
of this process that the local production of special commodities should be subject 
to diminution. and extinction, and that the labours hitherto engaged in such local 
production should become gradually worthless, Quite as much labour as before 
might be expended in achieving the result, but it would be misapplied; it 
ought not to command the same return; it should cease. It is at least difficult to 
foresee how far the production of commodities exposed to free competition could 
be maintained by communities themselves in face of the movement we have 
described. There would be a danger of pressure to do away with invasive com- 
petition—action which, in my judgment, would be destructive of the most powerful 
cause of improvement in the condition of the people. There would be an allied 
danger of a refusal to recognise the possibility of a diminished worth of work 
which remains as toilsome as ever, and of an increasing congestion of labour when 
the great movement of the world demands its dispersion. It may be that those 
evils are not inevitable, but they would require to be faced if any serious attempt 
were made to increase the range of national or municipal industries, and I have not 
yet seen any attempt at their serious investigation. 
The position thus taken may be illustrated by an experience to which I have 
elsewhere referred, but so pregnant with suggestion that I need not apologise for 
recalling it. My native county, Cornwall, was in my boyhood the scene of wide- 
spread activity in copper and tin mining. There had not been wanting warnings 
that the competition of richer deposits in far countries would put an end to these 
industries in the county, but the warnings had not been realised and remained 
unheeded. In the years that have since passed they have been gradually and 
almost completely fulfilled. There are no copper mines now in Cornwall, and the 
tin mines, which were scattered far and wide throughout the county, are reduced 
to two or three within one limited area. It is not the case that the ores have 
been exhausted; they could still be raised, but at a cost of production making the 
process unprofitable. The mines were abandoned one by one, and the population 
of the county has steadily diminished in every recent census. What would the 
experience have been had the mines been a county or national property worked by 
county or nation? I do not stop to comment on the difficulty of expropriating 
present owners, which, however, must not be forgotten. If the collective owner 
had leased the mines to companies of adventurers (to use the local phrase), the 
lessees would have gradually relinquished their concessions, as they have done 
when taking them from private owners. Nor would the case have been materially 
different even if the collective owner had introduced the novel stipulation into his 
leases that the working miners should be paid according to prescribed rates of 
wages. The process of relinquishment might have been precipitated and accelerated 
by insisting on such a condition, but otherwise the experience would have been the 
same. The shrinkage of industry would go on without a check, and it is to be 
hoped that the workmen who found their work failing would, with the fine courage 
and enterprise they have in fact shown, have betaken themselves to the fields of 
mining industry displacing their own in all parts of the world. Can one think that 
the same process would have been maintained had the collective owner worked 
the mines directly, and the working men looked to county or nation for the con- 
tinuance of work and wages? The attachment which all men have for the homes 
of themselves and their fathers would have stimulated a demand for a recurrence 
to the other resources of the collective owner for the maintenance of an industry 
that was dying. Some demand might even be made for a repression or prohibition 
of that competition which was the undoing of the local industry. These possi- 
bilities may be regarded as fanciful, and it is true that forces might be kept under 
control that operated within an area and affected a population relatively so 
limited. But what if the warnings of Jevons respecting coal in England proved like 
the warnings of the men who foresaw the cessation of tin mining in Cornwall, and 
the community had to deal with the problem of the dwindling coal industry in 
face of nationalised coal mines and_armies of workmen employed by the nation ? 
The initial difficulties of the nationalisation of that which for centuries has been 
1896. 3.1L 
