When we differ, it is in deciding on the means to carry out our common purpose; and here we differ very widely. Some would use the power of the State to correct and improve our system of industry, and these constitute a party of reform. Others would abolish that system and substitute something untried. For private capital they would put public capital and for private management, public management--either in the whole field of industry or in that great part of it where large capital rules. These are Socialists in the modern and current sense of the term. One difference of view which was formerly very sharp is now scarcely traceable. Every one knows that we must invoke the aid of the State in order to make industry what it should be. The rule that would bid the State keep its hands off the entire field of business, the extreme _laissez-faire_ policy once dominant in literature and thought, now finds few persons bold enough to advocate it or foolish enough to believe in it. In a very chastened form, however, the spirit that would put a reasonable limit on what the State shall be asked to do happily does survive and is powerful. It seeks a golden mean between letting the State do nothing and asking it to do everything. It is this plan of action that I shall try to outline, and it will appear that even this plan requires that the State should do very much. Under an inert government the industrial system would suffer irreparably. The thing first to be rescued is competition--meaning that healthful rivalry between different producers which has always been the guaranty of technical progress. That such progress has gone on with bewildering rapidity since the invention of the steam engine is nowhere denied; and neither is it denied that competition of the normal kind--the effort of rivals to excel in productive processes--has caused it. It has multiplied the product of labor here tenfold, there, twentyfold, and elsewhere a hundredfold and more. This increased power to produce has rescued us from an appalling evil. Without it, such a crowding of population as some countries have experienced would have carried their peoples to and below the starvation level. Machinery now enables us to live; and if world-crowding were to go on in the future as it has done, and the technical progress should cease, many of us could not live. Poverty would increase till its cruelest effects would be realized and lives enough would be crushed out to enable the survivors to get a living. Of all conditions of human happiness, the one which is most underestimated is progress in power to produce. Hardly any of those who would revolutionize the industrial State, and not all of those who would reform it, have any conception of the importance of this progress. It is the _sine qua non_ of any hopeful outlook for the future of mankind.