industrial revolution.

I may mention here a consideration which applies practically to Great
Britain. We are a great exporting country, living by international
trade, the world's greatest retail shopkeeper whose business is
constantly changing in character and direction. The great structure of
international commerce on which our national life depends is essentially
a sphere in which elasticity is of the utmost importance, and in which
standardised or stereotyped methods of control of production or exchange
would be highly disastrous. Liberal policy, therefore, aims at keeping
the field of private enterprise in business as wide as possible. But in
the general discussion of political or personal liberty in economic
affairs, we have to consider how far and in what way the freedom of
private enterprise needs to be limited or curtailed for the common good.
We must solve that problem. For Liberals there is no inherent sanctity
in the conceptions of private property, or of private enterprise. They
will survive, and we can support them only so long as they appear to
work better in the public interest than any possible alternatives.


RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

My object, then, is to show how a system which embodies a large amount
of private enterprise can be made tolerable and acceptable to modern
ideas of equity. For this purpose we need to consider (1) what have we
done in that direction in the past? (2) what is the setting of the
economic problem to-day, and (3) what is to be our policy for the
future?

Dealing first with wealth and wages, the whole field of social