M.A., C.H., C.B.E.; Editor of the _Economist_, 1922; formerly Member of
Munitions Council, and Director of Economic and Financial Section of the
League of Nations; Director of Welwyn Garden City; Fellow of Gonville
and Caius College, Cambridge, 1910.
Mr. Layton said:--The existing system of private enterprise has been
seriously attacked on many grounds. For my present purpose I shall deal
with four: (1) The critic points to the extreme differences of wealth
and poverty which have emerged from this system of private enterprise;
(2) it has produced and is producing to-day recurrent periods of
depression which result in insecurity and unemployment for the worker;
(3) the critics say the system is producing great aggregations of
capital and monopolies, and that by throwing social power into the hands
of those controlling the capital of the country, it leads to
exploitation of the many by industrial and financial magnates; (4) it
produces a chronic state of internal war which saps industrial activity
and the economic life of the community.
I shall not attempt to minimise the force of these objections; but in
order to get our ideas into correct perspective it should be observed
that the first two of these features are not new phenomena arising out
of our industrial system. You find extreme inequalities of distribution
in practically all forms of society--in the slave state, the feudal
state, in India and in China to-day. Nor is this the first period of
history in which there has been insecurity. If you look at any primitive
community, and note the effect of harvest fluctuations and the
inevitable famine following upon them, you will recognise that the
variations of fortune which affect such communities are more disastrous
in their effect than the trade variations of the modern world.
But after all qualifications have been made these four indictments are
sufficiently serious and must be met, for it is these and similar
considerations which have driven many to desire the complete abolition
of the system. Some wish to abolish private property, and desire a
Communist solution. Others practically attack the system of private
enterprise, and wish to substitute either the community in some form or
another (_e.g._ state socialism), or some corporate form of industry
(_e.g._ guild socialism).