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DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM
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enced purchase, competition, expropriation with guarantee of income (and if we add the case of the Suez Canal, the acquiring of national interests in undertakings) as steps to public ownership, and as time goes on other methods appropriate to circumstances will be adopted. When the state is in a better position than it is now to absorb industry, it will extend the principle of the Development Commission and the Congested Districts Boards of Ireland and Scotland, and these Boards will then act for the development of state enterprise, and not merely to spur on, to enlighten and to guide private enterprise. In fact, upon this, which may be granted to be the most difficult part of the Socialist evolution to forecast with any certainty, numerous public activities are beginning to throw a light. What is quite certain is that the state will adopt different methods of acquiring control of industrial capital, but that none of them—unless a catastrophe were to be precipitated by the reaction—can be called confiscation with any justice.

4. Right to Work.

The political demands of Socialism cannot be understood better than by a study of the "Right to Work." The demand has a long and a rich history in the course of which political theory, Socialist points of view, and historical events would have to be reviewed. Had Anton Menger lived, he might have written that history. In a short section of a