This, I suggest, can be accomplished in two ways. It can be done, first, by limiting the profits private ownership can make in any industry of vital importance, either absolutely so that the owners are debenture-holders merely, and not the residuary legatees of any profit made, or relatively, as in a scheme like that laid down for the gas companies of London. The state is then, I suggest, legitimately entitled to argue that a curb on the liberty of the employer to make what profit he can justifies a curb on the right to strike by postulating the conditions under which alone it can become operative. Those conditions are, I think, met by some such instrument as the Canadian Industrial Disputes Investigation Act. Under its terms, we should then have, at least, enforced public inquiry into the dispute, and the consideration by both sides, as well as by the general opinion of the community, of a reasoned attempt at a solution of the difficulty. We respect freedom of association by leaving it at liberty to insist that the proposed solution is unjust, while we protect the public interest in continuity of service by insisting that the right to strike shall not operate until the resources of conciliation have been exhausted. I reject, therefore, M. Duguit’s notion that public interest in continuity of service is a paramount consideration which should overrule all others; and I see no reason to apply his vituperative adjectives[37] to those who take a different view. It seems to me quite definitely a denial of liberty for which no justification can be found to say that men shall work on terms they think utterly unjust; and the argument that, if they do not like those terms, they can find other work, is, increasingly, without force in a community like our own. The number of those in any society who have a genuine choice, at any given time, of alternative occupations is notably small. An electrician cannot suddenly become a barrister, as the latter can suddenly become a journalist; and if it is a matter of hundreds, or even thousands of men, the compulsion upon them to continue in the vocation for which they have been trained is obvious. The community never gains, in the long run, from work performed by men who labour under a sense of injustice. That psychological feeling of frustration is poisonous to a harmonious personality. As such, it is incompatible with that search for freedom which I have urged is a condition of happiness. I cannot, therefore, agree that the community is entitled, on any terms, to put its convenience first, and the workers’ freedom afterwards.