Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/177

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IN THE SOCIALIST STATE
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its people enabled them to take the fullest and the most brutal advantage of the economic laws of concentration of capital and management. Germany got its markets because it established scientific laboratories and linked them up with industrial processes.

Now, under Socialism, our educational institutions would be revolutionised. Science would be our guide in everything. Even to-day, thanks mainly to the state or to public corporations working with the aid and the mind of the state, this change is beginning. Agricultural, technical, industrial laboratories are being opened. Universities are running experimental farms, are testing seeds, manures, soils, are advising farmers about crops, stock, diseases, dairy products, and everything else that concerns them; they are establishing industrial laboratories where post-graduate students may work not only on experiments relating to pure science, but on those relating to applied science; town councils and county councils are aiding the work and are supplementing it by independent efforts of their own. All these activities have been hampered and delayed in this country, in the first place, owing to the blindness and lack of education amongst our "captains of industry," who have followed the profit-making ideals of commercialism only too closely; and, in the second place, owing to our mistrust of state action making us look in other directions for our aid, and also making that state action inefficient and inadequate when it was at last begun. It must not be overlooked that it is in Germany