Labour’s proposal, therefore, is to abolish capitalism and replace it by that brand of Socialism known as “nationalization and democratic control.” We should first realize what we owe to the capitalism which we are asked to destroy. Our first debt is certainly liberty. This is convincingly worked out by Mr. Harold Cox in his _Economic Liberty_, p. 2. Liberty to possess and use property consistently with the good of the community, liberty to buy, to sell, to work, to strike, in fact complete liberty in all economic relations. This is to be surrendered and replaced by the bureaucratic control of the State Socialist, or the equally autocratic control under the scheme of the Guild Socialist. Liberty is a prize not hastily to be relinquished. This capitalistic system is not the selfish system as described by Labour. It can only exist provided it supplies commodities and services, of which the community stands in need, at prices which the community can afford to pay. That is no light responsibility. One of the necessary consequences of any socialistic organization of industry is that the community must use and pay for such commodities as it is convenient and desirable for industry to produce; under any socialistic regime, therefore, the consumer, instead of being an object of regard, becomes a mere wheel in the mechanism of production. The capitalistic system develops energy and thrift, though the former has been largely neutralized by the sterilizing effect of Trade Union doctrines against output, and the latter frustrated by the inability of industry as a result of production thus restricted to pay high wages. Under a socialistic regime the worker is to receive not wages but “pay” and whether he works or not. All progress in industry depends upon initiative and enterprise and the readiness to take risks. To-day risks are assumed by the owner of capital and, if they materialize, they are borne by him and not by the workers or the community. It would be ludicrous to say that either the State under State Socialism or industry under any form of democratic control would or could exert the same initiative or show the same enterprise as the private capitalist. Economic history teems with examples of great industries now employing thousands of workers which were originally established by capitalists who, stubbornly persistent, refused to accept failure and by sheer dogged enterprise won through. The world has wonderfully prospered under the capitalistic organization in industry. We see social conditions enormously improved, innumerable social reforms effected, the welfare and well-being of the people prodigiously advanced. Sir Josiah Stamp—an outstanding authority—said in 1921, as a result of a statistical investigation, “the ordinary person of to-day is four times as well off in real commodities as the person in the corresponding stage in the scale in the beginning of the nineteenth century.” During this hundred years the population has quadrupled.