enterprises owing to want of adaptability and elasticity could only compete with private enterprise in businesses such as banking and transport, which could be conducted more or less in accordance with routine. It is true that in those departments which Adam Smith marked out as the special province of joint-stock companies, joint-stock enterprise has won some of its greatest triumphs, but it is also true that it has driven the private undertaker out of many other fields of activity in which he has expected to be victorious, and that even in such matters as retail shopkeeping, the joint-stock company is rapidly establishing itself as the dominant force. As joint-stock enterprise has grown and improved itself, it is quite possible that State enterprise worked by official administration might do likewise. But when we have made the fullest allowances for what the State might or might not be able to do some day, the fact remains that at the present crisis we have no right to gamble on possibilities. As things are at present, it seems most probable that it would be economically disastrous to hand over the whole productive power of society to officials. The mere hugeness of the scale on which things would have to be done must, until
