The recent growth of "municipalising" enterprises is another outcome of this spirit. The principle of it seems to be to absorb any public business which appears profitable, whether conveyance, supplies of material, or contracting for public work. Apart from the fact that only strong personal interest in management will make such enterprises profitable, there is also the inherent objection to the bad management which clings to the atrophy of mind of officials, as such; but there is also another serious influence upon character, which we should notice. The energy and initiative needed to start and work improvements, which is the essential source of profit in business, is easily suppressed or driven away. Many an enterprise which would succeed well is set aside because of the risks or the trouble of starting it, many another is left alone owing to little deterring causes; and if the great incentive of the possibility of large profits on some schemes, to compensate for the risks of many failures, is cut away by a municipality having the right of seizure of whatever succeeds, the whole enterprising character is cut down at the roots, to the immense injury of the nation at large. Supposing that some public enterprise makes 20 per cent. profit to its shareholders, the people who use it are certainly better off, or they would leave it alone, and the profit is no loss to the community, as it merely means so much transferred from one pocket to another, and none wasted. But if such enterprises are choked at the roots by fear of seizure, the whole community suffers. Who will care to develop suburbs by starting electric trams when the whole can be seized in twenty-one years, so soon as it begins to repay the risks incurred? This short-sighted grasping system has held England back behind most civilised countries, and been a gigantic public loss, not only by hindering specific enterprises, but more by thwarting most valuable characteristics. CHAPTER III. TRADE UNIONISM, ITS FLOWER AND FRUITION. When we are continually assured that there is a new and better way of doing anything, it is only reasonable to ask if anyone has tried it before. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating," and if some one has eaten such a pudding before us, we may be saved from using up good materials in a bad concoction. Until now the attention of historians has been so fixed upon the great military autocracy of Rome, that the growth of trade unionism and socialism under that government has been overlooked. Here we will trace and put together such facts as seem curiously parallel to the growth of modern unionism; and which, when they outstep our present position, may serve to show what further developments may be expected by us.