to everybody the luxurious number of three.  Let us next suppose that the director of one group dies, that his place is taken by a man of inferior powers, and that this group, as a consequence of his less efficient direction, instead of producing thirty loaves can produce no more than ten.  Now, although this falling off in production has occurred in one group only, the loss which results from it is felt by the entire community.  The total output has sunk from sixty loaves to forty; and the members of the group which retains its old efficiency, no less than those of the group which has lost so much of it, have to be content, with a dividend, not of three loaves, but two.  Finally, let us suppose that, owing to a continued deterioration in management, the ten men of whom the first group is composed are able to produce daily, not ten loaves, but only five.  That is to say, the number of loaves which they produce comes to no more than half of the minimum they are obliged to eat.  Here it is obvious that, unless one-half of the population is to die, it can only be kept alive by being given a supply of loaves which, in consequence of its own inefficiency, must be taken out of the mouths of others.

[11] A similar drama enacted itself in London more than two centuries ago.  Private enterprise established a penny post.  The state killed it, and deprived the metropolis of this service for a hundred and fifty years.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY. 
SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT

When socialism, says Mr. Sidney Webb, shall have abolished all other monopolies, there will still remain to be dealt with the most formidable monopoly of all—­namely, “the natural monopoly of business ability,” or “the special ability and energy with which some persons are born.”  The services of these monopolists, he sees and fully admits, would be as essential to a socialistic as they are to any other community which desires to prosper according to modern standards.  He sees and admits also that these exceptional men will not continuously exert or even develop their talents unless society can supply them with some adequate motive or stimulus.  Accordingly, since he maintains that no scheme of society would be socialistic in any practical sense which did not completely, or at least approximately, eliminate the motive mainly operative among such men at present—­namely, that supplied by the possibility of exceptional economic gain—­he fairly faces the fact that some motive of a different kind will have to be discovered by socialists which shall take the place of this.

I mention Mr. Webb in particular merely because he represents the views which all intellectual socialists are coming to hold likewise.  This specific problem of how to provide the natural monopolists of business ability with all adequate motive to develop and exercise their talents is engaging more and more the attention of the higher socialistic thinkers; and if we take together the passages in their writings which deal with it, it has by this time a voluminous literature of its own.