568 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
comparatively simple measure, on which such high hopes had once
been set, of taking the means of production out of private hands.1

This was no radical remedy because, under the industrial dispensa-
tion, the private employer was in truth no longer the ultimate villain
of the piece. Oppression by profiteering private employers or by rack-
renting private landlords had, after all, been the lot of many workers
in the histories of many societies, including the Western Society itself,
in the days before the advent of a Western Machine Age; and before
this Western Industrial Revolution, as well as after it, economic oppres-
sion had provoked resistance among its victims. Yet, under those pre-
industrial dispensations, this resistance had never organized itself on
trade-union lines and had never displayed the trade-union spirit; and
the explanation of these new departures in the character of the resistance
movement was that under the new industrial dispensation the personal
oppressor who was the workers' familiar bugbear had been reduced,
by his own revolutionary achievement, from his age-old status of being
one of the principals in a conflict between two human antagonists to
the novel status of being merely the personal agent of an impersonal
force. The pressure against which the industrial workers were reacting
could not be removed by eliminating the private employer, because this
was a new pressure inherent in the new technique of machine industry.
So costly an initial capital investment could not be made to yield an
economically adequate return on the outlay unless the wheels were kept
revolving at full speed, night and day, year in and year out; and, while
it was true that a private owner of the plant would therefore be bound
to press the human tenders of these Satanic mills to make the utmost
exertions that the management could wring out of them, any public
owner—municipality, community, or state alike—would be bound for
the same reasons to do likewise.

Thus the change from private to public ownership could not abate
a pressure that was being exerted on the industrial workers by the
impersonal force of a mechanized technique; and, indeed, the repre-
sentation of this impersonal oppressor by a public instead of a private
agent made the trade unions* task of conducting the workers' resistance
movement a more difficult one psychologically and politically. In con-
tending with the ci-devant private employers before the bar of public
opinion, the trade unions had been able to put their adversaries 'on
the spot' by manoeuvring them into the invidious role of harpies who
were so bent upon grinding the faces of the poor that, rather than give
the workers their due, they were prepared to deprive the public of
essential economic services by forcing the workers to resort to a strike
as their only practicable means of redress. It was not so easy to bring
odium upon a public authority by accusing it of being actuated by
motives of personal cupidity. A public authority was indeed as awkward

* This was not to say that in a mechanized society it was right or wise or feasible to
leave Private Property uncurbed now that this traditional institution was being charged
by the new social force of Industrialism with an unprecedentedly powerful new 'drive'.
This point has been touched upon in IV. iv. 191-2. The measures for curbing Private
Property, -without abolishing it, that were being taken in Great Britain on the morrow
of the Second World War are noticed on pp. 588-92, below.