indeed, being worked out in Britain to-day, and the United States is making some attempt at its application in America. Its success would seem to imply a formal retention of capitalism as the directive power of industry, working in closely organized relations "with the employees in the several industries and the consumer as the co-ordinative factor in the relations of the several industries. Some such alteration in the form and functions of capitalism is also apparent in the Italian and the German schemes for a Corporative State. But in all these cases of public planning two difficulties have to be confronted. First, the question how far large personal gains are a necessary stimulus to the creative work of men responsible for rapid and advantageous improvements in technique and organization. Routine workers necessarily tend to overlook the enormous productive importance of such creative activities, or to think that they can always be secured by departments of technical research attached to each industry. It may, therefore, be desirable to leave outside any scheme of public planning those newer industries where rapid improvements of technique may be expected and those industries most susceptible to changes in the demand for the goods they supply.
But important as this question may be of securing the best inventive and administrative services by adequate incentives of gain, there remains another question of still greater importance, viz. the utilization or the displacement of that financial control over big industry which is the latest fruit of capitalist evolution. The closest study of this financial control has been made by the American economist Thorstein Veblen who examines the relations which exist in the United States between the manipulations of credit and prices and the industrial management. Whereas the latter aims at the highest technical and working efficiency in producing . the maximum output, the former
