Of course, it takes time to get used to doing things by the more direct method and without the accustomed circumlocution of accountancy, or the accustomed allowance for profits to go to interested parties who, under the financial regime, hold a power of discretionary permission in all matters that touch the use of the industrial arts.

Under these urgent material exigencies, investment comes to have much of the appearance of a gratuitous drag and drain on the processes of industry.
Here, again, is a sinister contingency; sinister, that is, for those vested rights of ownership by force of which the owners of "capital" are enabled to permit or withhold the use of the industrial arts by the community at large, on pain of privation in case the accustomed toll to the owners of capital is not paid.

It is, of course, not intended to find fault with this arrangement; which has the sanction of "time immemorial" and of a settled persuasion that it lies at the root of all civilised life and intercourse.

It is only that in case of extreme need this presumed indispensable expedient of industrial control has broken down, and that experience is proving it to be, in these premises, an item of borrowed trouble.

Should experience continue to run on the same lines for an appreciable period and at a high tension, it is at least conceivable that the vested right of owners to employ unlimited sabotage in the quest of profits might fall so far into disrepute as to leave them under a qualified doubt on the return of "normal" conditions.