Hence in coal mining, where ownership and management are sharply separated, the owners will not admit the bare possibility of any system in which the control of the administration of the mines is shared between the management and the miners. "I am authorized to state on behalf of the Mining Association," Lord Gainford, the chief witness on behalf of the mine-owners, informed the Coal Commission, "that if the owners are not to be left complete executive control they will decline to accept the responsibility for carrying on the industry."[2] So the mine-owners blow away in a sentence the whole body of plausible make-believe which rests on the idea that, while private ownership remains {112} unaltered, industrial harmony can be produced by the magic formula of joint control. And they are right. The representatives of workmen and shareholders, in mining and in other industries, can meet and negotiate and discuss. But joint administration of the shareholders' property by a body representing shareholders and workmen is impossible, because there is no purpose in common between them. For the only purpose which could unite all persons engaged in industry, and overrule their particular and divergent interests, is the provision of service. And the object of shareholders, the whole significance and _metier_ of industry to them, is not the provision of service but the provision of dividends. In industries where management is divorced from ownership, as in most of the highly organized trades it is to-day, there is no obvious halfway house, therefore, between the retention of the present system and the complete extrusion of the capitalist from the control of production. The change in the character of ownership, which is necessary in order that coal or textiles and ship-building may be organized as professions for the service of the public, cannot easily spring from within. The stroke needed to liberate them from the control of the property-owner must come from without. In theory it might be struck by action on the part of organized workers, who would abolish residuary profits and the right of control by the mere procedure of refusing to work as long as they were maintained, on the historical analogy offered by peasants who have destroyed {113} predatory property in the past by declining to pay its dues and admit its government, in which case Parliament would intervene only to register the community's assent to the _fait accompli_. In practice, however, the conditions of modern industry being what they are, that course, apart from its other disadvantages, is so unlikely to be attempted, or, if attempted, to succeed, that it can be neglected. The alternative to it is that the change in the character of property should be affected by legislation in virtue of which the rights of ownership in an industry are bought out simultaneously.