[9] While these pages were in the hands of the printers, a work was published by an American socialist, in which it is asserted that the socialisation of America would consist at first of this precise process--namely, the conversion of all the existing active employers and directors of labour into the salaried servants of some state department. CHAPTER VII PROXIMATE DIFFICULTIES. ABLE MEN AS A CORPORATION OF STATE OFFICIALS For the moment, then, we will waive the problem of motive altogether; we will assume that a society which denied to its able men any pecuniary reward proportionate to the magnitude of its products could provide them with a motive of some kind--we need not inquire what--which would prompt them still to exert themselves as eagerly as they do now; and we will merely consider how, a multitude of such men being given, the most efficient of them could be constantly selected as the official directors of labour, and the rest, in proportion to their inefficiency, be either dismissed or excluded. In order to realise the difficulties which, in this respect, socialism would have to face, let us consider the manner in which the problem is solved now. Under the system of private capitalism it solves itself by an automatic process. In order that any man may direct the labour of other men, he must, under that system, be the possessor or controller of so much wage-capital. Now this capital--this implement of direction--in proportion as it is employed, disappears, and is reproduced only by a subsequent sale of the products resulting from the labour in the direction of which it has been expended. Thus a man, we will say, invents a new engine for motor-cars, and devotes to the production of twenty engines of the kind all the capital which he possesses--namely, two thousand guineas. Apart from the raw material out of which the engines are to be constructed, his whole expenditure will consist in paying wages to certain labourers, on condition that they work up this metal in a manner which he prescribes to them. For the raw metal he pays, we will say, a hundred pounds, or the odd shillings of the guineas. He pays to twenty labourers a hundred pounds apiece as wages; and the result is twenty engines. If the engines are successful, and if the public will give him a hundred and fifty guineas for each of them, the man has got his entire capital back again, with a thousand guineas added to it, and can continue his direction of labour by means of wages, on the same lines, and on a much more extended scale. But if the engines, when tried, develop some inherent defect, and he consequently can sell none of them, he may still, perhaps, get back the price of the raw metal--a petty sum, insufficient for his own needs--but his whole wage-capital will be gone, and with it his power of directing any further labour in the future. In other words, under the system of private capitalism, if labour has been directed by any man in an