I may mention here a consideration which applies practically to Great Britain.  We are a great exporting country, living by international trade, the world’s greatest retail shopkeeper whose business is constantly changing in character and direction.  The great structure of international commerce on which our national life depends is essentially a sphere in which elasticity is of the utmost importance, and in which standardised or stereotyped methods of control of production or exchange would be highly disastrous.  Liberal policy, therefore, aims at keeping the field of private enterprise in business as wide as possible.  But in the general discussion of political or personal liberty in economic affairs, we have to consider how far and in what way the freedom of private enterprise needs to be limited or curtailed for the common good.  We must solve that problem.  For Liberals there is no inherent sanctity in the conceptions of private property, or of private enterprise.  They will survive, and we can support them only so long as they appear to work better in the public interest than any possible alternatives.

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

My object, then, is to show how a system which embodies a large amount of private enterprise can be made tolerable and acceptable to modern ideas of equity.  For this purpose we need to consider (1) what have we done in that direction in the past? (2) what is the setting of the economic problem to-day, and (3) what is to be our policy for the future?

Dealing first with wealth and wages, the whole field of social legislation has a bearing upon them, including particularly education, elementary and technical, the Factory Acts, and a great mass of legislation which has affected the earning powers of the worker and the conditions under which he labours.  Just before the war we had come to the point of fixing a minimum wage in the mines, but an even more important factor was that we had introduced the Trade Board system, which had begun to impose a minimum wage in certain trades where wages were particularly low.  But the most important direct attack upon the unequal distribution of wealth was by taxation in accordance with the Liberal policy of a graduated and differential income-tax, and still more important by taxes upon inheritance; for it has long been recognised that though it may be desirable to allow men to accumulate great wealth during their lifetime, it by no means follows that they should be entitled to control the distribution of wealth in the next generation and launch their children on the world with a great advantage over their fellows of which they may be quite unworthy.  On the question of insecurity it cannot be said that any serious attack has been made on the problem of how to diminish fluctuations of trade, but again the Liberal solution for dealing with that difficulty was to remedy not the cause but its effects by insurance.