That this is no fanciful estimate can be shown by an appeal to facts.  We may take as an example the case of the British post-office.  The inefficient transmission of letters some twenty years ago in London provoked an effort to supplement it by a service of private messengers.  The post-office authorities were instantly up in arms, ready to nip this enterprise in the bud, and forcibly prevent any other human being from doing what they were still, to all appearance, determined not to do themselves.[11] Then, as a grudging concession, permission to transmit letters with a promptitude which the post-office still declined to emulate was accorded to a company on condition that for each letter carrier the post-office should be paid as it would have been had it carried the letter itself; and thus there was established at last the institution of the Boy Messengers.

Similar examples are afforded by the conduct of the state in France, where the manufacture of tobacco and matches are both of them state monopolies.  To say that the tobacco produced by the French state is unsmokable, and that the matches produced by it will not light a candle, would no doubt be an exaggeration; but they are both inferior to the products which private enterprise could, if left to itself, produce at the same price.  And private enterprise is, indeed, not wholly suppressed.  Excellent tobacco and matches, both of private manufacture, are allowed to be sold in France; but the producers of both are artificially handicapped by having to pay to the state, on every box or every pound sold, either the whole or part of the profit which the state itself would have made by selling an equal quantity of its own inferior articles.

The very fact, indeed, that the state, as a producer, or a renderer of public services, such as letter-carrying, has thus to protect itself against the competition of private enterprise, is sufficient evidence of the difficulties which a state organisation encounters in securing industrial ability which shall be constantly of the highest kind, and also of its inevitable tendency to hamper, if not to stifle, the development and the practical activity of superior ability elsewhere.  And if these difficulties and this tendency are appreciable in state-directed industries now, when the area of direction is small and strictly limited, the reader may easily imagine how incalculably more formidable they would become if extended, as socialism would extend them, to the activities of the entire community.

We have thus far been considering the position of the directors of socialised industry on the assumption that they would be free to follow the dictates of their own several intelligences, without any technical interference from officials of any other kind.  Let us now consider the alternative which, in any socialistic society, would most closely coincide with fact.  This is the assumption that the official directors of labour would not be technical autocrats, but would be subject to the control of their brother officials, the statesmen, who represented the great mass of the people.