Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt:... INTRODUCTION This book has been written with the aim of presenting, n a connected form, the main features of the outstanding schemes for industrial reconstruction now before the public, together with the reasons for which they are advocated. Broad methods of dealing with the industrial situation as a whole have alone been considered; thus, while some attention has been given to profitsharing (which, in alliance with cognate measures, is felt by not a few to be generally applicable to our present difficulties) no mention has been made of particular proposals for the reorganisation of particular industries. Even so selection has been necessary; and the guiding principle (which in one case only has been abandoned) has been to deal with those proposals about which the most widespread curiosity is felt in this country at the present time. Thus Whitley Councils and the Soviet System, which are often the subject of contemporary discussion, are alike included; Anarchist Communism, on the other hand, is referred to only in a footnote, not but that it is a subject of considerable interest, but because it is obviously outside the main stream in England to-day. For the same reason exigencies of space have necessitated silence on two great schemes of reform, which are nevertheless of such importance that brief reference must be made to them here. The first is that which, finding the root of all our evils, not (with the Socialists) in the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange in general, but in the private ownership of land in particular, would by a 'single tax' on land values inaugurate an era of universal freedom; the second (which is not new, but has during the last year or two been vigorously restated in the...