F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 101 



The World Economic Conference did not give to these claims the 

 endorsement which they hoped to obtain. We get only the conclusion 

 that combines may be good or bad according to the motives and outlook 

 of those who direct them. This means that, as economists, we have to 

 return, without any prejudice from names and titles, to the study of a 

 stage of evolution, taken as actual. The change in public opinion must 

 no doubt also be taken as a fact. But this is a thing which may at one 

 time swing toward the producer, at another toward the consumer, 

 according to the conditions of the economic conjuncture. At present 

 the difficulties of the producer are more prominent than usual. On the 

 other hand, in the immediate post-war boom, we had the Committee on 

 Trusts, the Profiteering Act and its Committees, and a different attitude 

 toward what had not yet come to be called rationalisation. From any 

 long point of view, a perplexing problem is offered, because if on one hand 

 it is held that industrial joint stock competition is becoming irrational in 

 intensity, and will be destructive of itself as one industry after another 

 reaches an advanced stage of capitalist organisation — on the other hand, 

 monopolist tendency is also unstable in face of public criticism. Hence 

 some dread, and others hope for, more attention to the third method, that 

 of public control, applied at any rate in some large instances. 



III. 



But it is still possible that, besides the insecurities and instabilities 

 of competition, and the dangers of monopolist influence, there may be 

 another idea according to which private enterprise may work out its 

 future. This is the idea of leadership. It was the view of the Balfour 

 Committee that, if industry was to be adequately responsive to changing 

 conditions, and was to develop co-operation amid competition, it would 

 specially need ' the exercise of the highest qualities of imaginative leader- 

 ship.' If we compare industry with the other great systems of 

 administration — political, military, and ecclesiastical — it is evident that 

 the latter exist as systems because leadership has a definite place within 

 them. They are organised under this form. In industry the fact is 

 tending to obtain more consideration, but the question is of its formal 

 recognition and status. Policy means leadership, and leadership means 

 control ; to control anything well, it is necessary to control a large part 

 of it ; and industry is so far from being, as regards conceptions of organisa- 

 tion, in pari materia with other organised forms of activity, that definite 

 leadership has to overcome objections of a quite unique kind. This is 

 because of a fundamental difference between industry and the public 

 services, in respect of their immediate aims, and of their relation to the 

 idea of responsibility. It will later be seen how this affects arguments 

 relating to industrial control, and to the creation within industry of any 

 sort of employees' franchise — an idea brought over from politics, on the 

 implied assumption that politics is the type of democratic and responsible 

 control. Meanwhile it is necessary to show how evolution has created 

 the leadership in industry which seeks to confirm its position by com- 

 bination, but whose ' sanctions ' create the industrial problem referred 

 to above. 



