Principles of western civilisation

430 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

fails, to shelter themselves behind their limited liability and leave the creditors in the lurch. In neither case is it honest trading. But the law allows it, and it is done.” !

And so the dualism is in evidence on all hands. It is often considered that joint-stock enterprises, undertaken by a company of shareholders and managed by a board of directors, are but the expression of the application to business and industry of the principles of modern representative government. But any observer who, going beyond the academic theories of an earlier phase of the competitive process, studies the subject practically for himself, finds sooner or later how entirely superficial, and even absurd, such a conception really is. There must have been in the past, and there must still continue to exist, undertakings owned by shareholders all fairly informed; all intelligently interested in the distant and solid success of the work in hand; all joined, moreover, in such feelings of loyalty to a common cause and a collective undertaking as operate elsewhere in the world. But what the observer begins gradually to realise is that such conditions are almost entirely foreign to the spirit of modern speculative enterprise. The management of such enterprises, although it may deal with affairs of the widest public interest and importance, is mostly conducted entirely in the dark. Although it may be concerned with financial affairs almost on the scale of those of the State itself, it is generally concentrated in a few hands and autocratic in the highest degree. Most serious of all, there is, therefore, no informed public opinion either to criticise

Y Pall Mall Gazette.