Invention and progress would likewise suffer. Men who were capable of devising new machines, new processes, new methods of combining capital and labour, would be slow to convert their potencies into action. They would be painfully aware that the spirit of inertia and routine prevailing throughout the industrial and political organisation would prevent their efforts from receiving quick recognition and adequate rewards. Inventors of mechanical devices particularly would be deprived of the stimulus which they now find in the hope of indefinitely large gains. Boards of directors, general managers, and other persons exercising industrial authority would be very slow to introduce new and more efficient financial or technical methods when they had no certainty that they would receive adequate reward in the form of either promotion or money compensation. They would see no sufficient reason for abandoning the established and pleasant policy of routine methods and unprogressive management. _Inefficient Labour_ The same spirit of inefficiency and mediocrity would permeate the rank and file of the workers. Indeed, it would operate even more strongly among them than among the officers and superiors; for their intellectual limitations and the nature of their tasks would make them less responsive to other than material and pecuniary motives. They would desire to follow the line of least resistance, to labour in the most pleasant conditions, to reduce irksome toil to a minimum. Since the great bulk of their tasks would necessarily be mechanical and monotonous, they would demand the shortest possible working day, and the most leisurely rate of working speed. And because of their numerical strength they would have the power to enforce this policy throughout the field of industry. They would have the necessary and sufficient votes. In a general way they might, indeed, realise that the practice of universal shirking and laziness must sooner or later result in such a diminution of the national product as to cause them great hardship, but the workers in each industry would hope that those in all the others would be more efficient; or doubt that a better example set by themselves would be imitated by the workers in other industries. They would not be keen to give up the certainty of easy working conditions for the remote possibility of a larger national product. _Attempted Replies to Objections_ All the attempts made by Socialists to answer or explain away the foregoing difficulties may be reduced to two: the achievements of government enterprises in our present system; and the assumed efficacy of altruism and public honour in a régime of Socialism.