capital is that labour should own some actual share in its own industries. A Lancashire authority, writing in 1887, foretold the day when the operatives in the cotton industry would possess a great portion of their mills, and already the better paid of them have large sums so invested. Similarly with our land. Here, too, and elsewhere, the best hope is that the savings of the people should be directed to investment in their own businesses. We should hear little in those days of the nationalisation by the State of industries which will be partly owned or controlled by the people themselves. The State is the name for every one else under an alias. Rather than vest their industries in the State, our artisans will prefer to vest their industries in themselves as shareholders.
Then would be, then will be, liberated a commercial energy calculated to confound our rivals and to amaze the world. Then those who have hitherto wasted their strength in the civil wars of business will join ranks to score triumphs such as we have never known. The army of industry will march not as conscripts, but as volunteers. In that day the last word of the industrial revolution will have been uttered. Nature will have surrendered to her insurgent son.
Therefore, behind the deceiving sunshine of the afternoon which, streaming over London, should have bared the abysses of poverty, instead of flattering with false visions of wealth, there seemed good hope still. We are mere neophytes, after all,
