Even though human nature should undergo the degree of miraculous transformation necessary to maintain an efficient industrial system on Socialist lines, such a social organisation must soon collapse because of its injurious effect upon individual liberty. Freedom of choice would be abolished in the most vital economic transactions; for there would be but one buyer of labour, and one seller of commodities. And these two would be identical, namely, the State. With the exception of the small minority that might be engaged in purely individual avocations, and in co-operative enterprises, men would be compelled to sell their labour to either the municipality or the national government. As competition between these two political agencies in the matter of wages and other conditions of labour could not be permitted, there would be virtually only one employer. Practically all material goods would have to be purchased from either the municipal or the national shops and stores. Since the city and the nation would produce different kinds of goods, the purchaser of any given article would be compelled to deal with one seller. His freedom of choice would be further restricted by the fact that he would have to be content with those kinds and grades of commodities which the seller saw fit to produce. He could not create an effective demand for new forms and varieties of goods, as he now does, by stimulating the ingenuity and acquisitiveness of competing producers and dealers. Prices and wages would, of course, be fixed beforehand by the government. The supposition that this function might be left to the workers in each industry is utterly impracticable. Such an arrangement would involve a grand scramble among the different industries to see which could pay its own members the highest wages, and charge its neighbours' members the highest prices. The final result would be a level of prices so high that only an alert and vigorous section of the workers in each industry could find employment. Not only wages and prices but hours, safety requirements, and all the other general conditions of employment, would be regulated by the government. The individuals in each industry could not be permitted to determine these matters any more than they could be permitted to determine wages. Moreover, all these regulations would from the nature of the case continue unchanged for a considerable period of time. The restriction of choice enforced upon the sellers of labour and the buyers of goods, the utter dependence of the population upon one agency in all the affairs of their economic as well as their political life, the tremendous social power concentrated in the State, would produce a diminution of individual liberty and a perfection of political despotism surpassing anything that the world has ever seen. It would not long be tolerated by any self respecting people.