into its own hands of the organization of its own labor as a thing
economically unclean, repugnant to the sturdy individual independence
of Englishmen, and as yet outside the sphere of practical politics,
seldom have the least suspicion of the extent to which it has already
been carried.[31] Besides our international relations and the army,
navy, police, and the courts of justice, the community now carries on
for itself, in some part or another of these islands, the post-office,
telegraphs, carriage of small commodities, coinage, surveys, the
regulation of the currency and note issue, the provision of weights
and measures, the making, sweeping, lighting, and repairing of
streets, roads, and bridges, life insurance, the grant of annuities,
shipbuilding, stockbroking, banking, farming, and money-lending. It
provides for many thousands of us from birth to burial--midwifery,
nursery, education, board and lodging, vaccination, medical attendance,
medicine, public worship, amusements, and interment. It furnishes
and maintains its own museums, parks, art galleries, libraries,
concert-halls, roads, streets, bridges, markets, slaughter-houses,
fire-engines, lighthouses, pilots, ferries, surf-boats, steam-tugs,
life-boats, cemeteries, public baths, washhouses, pounds, harbors,
piers, wharves, hospitals, dispensaries, gasworks, waterworks,
tramways, telegraph cables, allotments, cow meadows, artizans’
dwellings, schools, churches, and reading-rooms. It carries on and
publishes its own researches in geology, meteorology, statistics,
zoology, geography, and even theology. In our Colonies the English
Government further allows and encourages the communities to provide for
themselves railways, canals, pawn-broking, theatres, forestry, cinchona
farms, irrigation, leper villages, casinos, bathing establishments,
and immigration, and to deal in ballast, guano, quinine, opium, salt,
and what not. Every one of these functions, with those of the army,
navy, police, and courts of justice, were at one time left to private
enterprise, and were a source of legitimate individual investment
of capital. Step by step the community has absorbed them, wholly or
partially; and the area of private exploitation has been lessened.
Parallel with this progressive nationalization or municipalization of
industry, there has gone on the elimination of the purely personal
element in business management. The older economists doubted whether
anything but banking and insurance could be carried on by joint
stock enterprise: now every conceivable industry, down to baking and
milk-selling, is successfully managed by the salaried officers of large
corporations of idle shareholders. More than one-third of the whole
business of England, measured by the capital employed,[32] is now done
by joint stock companies, whose shareholders could be expropriated by
the community with no more dislocation of the industries carried on
by them than is caused by the daily purchase of shares on the Stock
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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