complete business coalition su^ested above, however consummate the machine system and the IbusinesB organization built upon it may become. So that when the last step in business coalition has been taken, there remains the competitive friction between the combined business capital and the I combined workmen.
I From the considerations recited above it appears that the competitive management of industry becomes incompatible with continued prosperity ao soon as the machine process has been developed to its fuller efficiency. Further technological advance must act to heighten the impracticability of competitive business. As it is sometimes expressed, the tendency to consolidation is irresistible. Modem circumstances do not permit the competitive management of property invested in industrial enterprise, much less its management in detail by the individual owners. In short, the exercise of free contract, and the other powers inhering in the natural right of ownership, are incompatible with the modem machine technology. Business discretion necessarily centres in other hands than those of the general body of owners. In the ideal case, so far as the machine technology and its business concomitants are consistently carried through, the general body of owners are necessarily reduced to the practical status of pensioners dependent on the dis-
THE THEORY OF MODERN WELFARE 26"
cretion of the great holders of immaterial wealth ■ the general body of business men are similarly, in the ideal outcome, disfranchised in point of business initiative and reduced to a bureaucratic hierarchy under the same guidance ; and the rest, the populace, is very difficult to bring into the schedule except as raw material of industry. What may take place to accentuate or mitigate this tendency is a question of the drift of sentiment on the matter of property rights, business obligations, and economic policy. So far as the economic factors at play in the modem situation shape this drift of sentiment they do so in large part indirectly,