liery, the oil well and even of the field are being used to raise heat and to generate electric power. The mineral, the vegetable and the animal raw materials are now being submitted to the scientist in order that he may extract from them every grain of treasure and every unit of energy. Cotton yields now not only its fibres but its seeds, which are no longer thrown aside until they have given up their precious oils to the soapmaker, the cattle food manufacturer and the chemist, which latter blends them with cotton lint to make high explosives and passes them on to the armament firm or to the public works contractor. As with raw cotton, so it is with timber, coal, and, latterly to an immense extent, with the oil products of the tropical forest, which figure in the toilet saloon, on the breakfast table, in the farm-yard and in the furniture store. As the sources of human wealth are split into their component elements and put together again by the exercise of intelligent human labour to supply the infinite requirements of society, the productions of field and mine and mill are drawn together into closer and ever more connected compass to form the technical and economical basis of social ownership and of international industrial democracy.
Capitalism and the State.
All this bringing together of the means of production, all this connecting up of the many processes in the preparation of a commodity, all this lacing and interlacing of highways ocean services, and wireless or cable message-bearing, have brought the administration of businesses, the management of departments, the movement of money and credit and the control of men to a stage where existing forms of government, local, national, imperial, are all out-of-date. State and federal parliaments, chambers of law-makers and tax-voters, cannot control the machinery of government, the officials of bureaucracy, much less take any real part in administering industry and directing production. It is not merely the personnel of Parliament, it is the character and purpose of the legislative chambers which make them unsuitable for the administrative requirements, whether of State Capitalism or of Social-Democracy. They are institutions which survive from a time when the State had nothing to do with the management of industry, except on a very insignificant scale. They are composed of men elected by property owners or
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