But taught by war-time experience, the Labour Party has become more cautious. It no longer contends as it used to do that all industries can be nationalized—an admission, the importance of which should not be overlooked. It would nationalize and democratically control only some of the great national industries, the smaller and less well-organized industries it will leave, for the present, alone. It even goes so far as to admit the economic necessity for the continuance of many middlemen. The industries that it would nationalize are those that were small and badly organized once, but which responded to the enterprise and initiative of the pioneers who made them and so grew great. This, when stripped of dialectics, means that Labour is satisfied that its regime of nationalization and democratic control whatever else it can achieve—and as to that we are left to speculate—cannot supply the enterprise and initiative requisite for the development of budding industries. At what stage in the growth of an industry Labour’s machinery of nationalization and democratic control can step in and infuse those two great qualities which are essential for vitality and progress, at a voltage higher than can be generated under private ownership, no information whatsoever is vouchsafed to us. Those who have studied with a critical eye the official details of Labour’s industrial policy in chapter VIII, will have noted that the same veil of indefiniteness enshrouds the practical working out of “nationalization and democratic control.” Is it to mean an increased financial burden on the State? No details. How is the requisite capital to be procured when we have performed the national obsequies over the private capitalist? No details, except that it will be derived from a mythical “national surplus” which now, at any rate, does not exist. By what means are the waste and inefficiency which experience has shown to be inherent in bureaucratically administered industries to be obviated? No details. What is the mechanism which is going to compel the home consumer to increase his consumption and the foreign consumer to buy commodities which he will not, and cannot, buy to-day? No information. Where will the secret fund be situated, and how is it to be formed, which is going to finance higher wages and better conditions than under the present scheme of industrial organization? We are not informed—that it cannot be built up from employers’ profits is clear from chapter XXVI. For the answers to these practical questions of crucial importance, and to many others, we are left groping in the dark. All we are told is that learned intellectuals of the Labour Party, out of their wealth of industrial research and ample gifts of prescience, when the proper time comes, will open their Pandora’s box and reveal the secrets. Is the nation prepared to gamble its existence on that assurance? Reform of Industry _v._ Reconstruction