both managerial and operative." How are these psychological obstacles to efficiency to be counteracted? By increased supervision and speeding up, by the allurements of a premium bonus system, or the other devices by which men who are too ingenious to have imagination or moral insight would bully or cajole poor human nature into doing what--if only the systems they invent would let it!--it desires to do, simple duties and honest work? Not at all. By turning the building of houses into what teaching now is, and Mr. Squeers thought it could never be, an honorable profession. "We believe," they write, "that the great task of our Industrial Council is to develop an entirely new system of industrial control by the members of the industry itself--the actual producers, whether by hand or brain, and to bring them into co-operation with the State as the central representative of the community whom they are organized to serve." Instead of unlimited profits, so "indispensable as an incentive to efficiency," the employer is to be paid a salary for his services as manager, and a rate of interest on his capital which is to be both fixed and (unless he fails to earn it through his own inefficiency) guaranteed; anything in excess of it, any "profits" in fact, which in other industries are distributed as dividends to shareholders, he is to {108} surrender to a central fund to be administered by employers and workmen for the benefit of the industry as a whole. Instead of the financial standing of each firm being treated as an inscrutable mystery to the public, with the result that it is sometimes a mystery to itself, there is to be a system of public costing and audit, on the basis of which the industry will assume a collective liability for those firms which are shown to be competently managed. Instead of the workers being dismissed in slack times to struggle along as best they can, they are to be maintained from a fund raised by a levy on employers and administered by the trade unions. There is to be publicity as to costs and profits, open dealing and honest work and mutual helpfulness, instead of the competition which the nineteenth century regarded as an efficient substitute for them. "Capital" is not to "employ labor." Labor, which includes managerial labor, is to employ capital; and to employ it at the cheapest rate at which, in the circumstances of the trade, it can be got. If it employs it so successfully that there is a surplus when it has been fairly paid for its own services, then that surplus is not to be divided among shareholders, for, when they have been paid interest, they have been paid their due; it is to be used to equip the industry to provide still more effective service in the future.