Consequently we may, condescending to vulgar language, say, as a certainty, that they will do their very best to stick to them.

All these official persons, as contrasted with the labouring public, will occupy positions of similar and desirable privilege; and while their latent rivalry among themselves will be hampered in the manner just indicated, they will none of them be inclined to welcome any further rivalry from without.

If the least efficient of our two naval constructors could not be forced by the fact of his relative inefficiency to hand over all or any portion of his authority to the other, and would certainly not be likely to do so of his own free will, it is still less likely that either would be willing to make such a sacrifice in favour of a man outside the privileged ranks, who desired an opportunity of demonstrating his practical superiority to both.
Under a system, in short, like that which we are now contemplating, the ability of the ablest directors might, in each branch of industry, raise the efficiency of the labour directed by themselves to as high a pitch as that to which it could be raised by the competition of to-day.

But the successes of the ablest men would have no tendency to self-extension.

The ablest men would do better than the less able, but would have no tendency to displace them; and the ablest and the least able members of the industrial oligarchy alike would instinctively oppose, and would also be in a position to check, the practical development of any competition from without.
That this is no fanciful estimate can be shown by an appeal to facts.