108 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



of lower products in a succession of stages. Of these lower products they 

 use what they require for their own finishing processes, and put the rest 

 on the market at Cartel prices. A strong vertical combination may have 

 leading influence as regards both its final and its lower products. And 

 dispersed in a less systematic way over the whole field are the holdings 

 which any large business has obtained in enterprises not closely related 

 to any main purpose. All these interconnections, made possible by the 

 flexibility of the Joint Stock system, aud disturbing to the theory of 

 economic competition and prices, suggest a few broad conclusions. 



First, the capacity of either management or direction is more difficult 

 to limit than that of technical industrial equipment. How broad, or deep, 

 an area of enterprise can be singly managed is a question to which all this 

 development is the only answer. And a fortiori of direction. Examina- 

 tion of our own ' Directory of Directors ' shows how widely this 

 consultative, responsibility can be extended, before teaching the limit of 

 its capacity. One prominent personality has thirty-two directorships, 

 thirteen of which are Chairman's positions, and three managing director- 

 ships ; some of the enterprises involved are among the largest of their 

 kind ; the range covers coal, railways, telegraphs, tea, asbestos, assurance, 

 shipping, banking, general merchandise, canals. There are many cases 

 where over a dozen of such important positions are singly held. These 

 great extensions of control are to be related to the impulse to use the 

 powers of management and direction at full capacity. On the other 

 hand, a public Department, with much greater routine, is supposed to be 

 one man's job. 



Second, the authority of business leaders will increase with the 

 magnitude of their engagements. An example of this was the hurried 

 endorsement of the proposals for international agreements between large 

 interests, on the repeated plea that we must not be ' afraid of big 

 business.' This became, with marked rapidity, the right thing to say, 

 and almost official sanction was given to recent conferences of business 

 leaders simply because the interests represented, and the plans considered, 

 were on the largest scale. With authority of this kind it will become 

 increasingly difficult to argue, or to contend against its claims that a 

 measure of monopolistic power may be essential to a scheme of 

 rationalisation. Industry being a field of more special knowledge than 

 politics, the difficulty is greater of applying criticism to leadership ; that 

 leadership itself is more concerned with working out the administrative 

 methods of higher control than with the question of its democratic position. 

 ' I do not consider,' said one of the organisers of international industrial 

 agreements, ' whether I may make these agreements ; I go on and make 

 them.' The relation of the community to this authority appears in the 

 end to be determined by the expectation that scale of responsibility, and 

 the labour of organisation required for these great industrial structures, 

 will tend to make leadership, in the words of the Balfour Committee, 

 ' imaginative,' and therefore considerate. It was in this expectation that 

 the recent Committee on Selling Agencies in the coal trade reconciled the 

 dilemma that what was necessary for high organisation would create the 

 possibility of monopoly. And so Liefmann says : ' When one considers 

 what efforts have been made in manv industries to obtain combination. 



