The Condition of Efficiency

Thus it is not only for the sake of the producers, on whom the old industrial order weighed most heavily, that a new industrial order is needed. It is needed for the sake of the consumers, because the ability on which the old industrial order prided itself most and which is flaunted most as an argument against change, the ability to serve them effectively, is itself visibly breaking down. It is breaking down at what was always its most vulnerable point, the control of the human beings whom, with characteristic indifference to all but their economic significance, it distilled for its own purposes into an abstraction called “Labor.” The first symptom of its collapse is what the first symptom of economic collapses has usually been in the past⁠—the failure of customary stimuli to evoke their customary response in human effort.

Till that failure is recognized and industry reorganized so that new stimuli may have free play, the collapse will not correct itself, but, doubtless with spasmodic revivals and flickerings of energy, will continue and accelerate. The cause of it is simple. It is that those whose business it is to direct economic activity are increasingly incapable of directing the men upon whom economic activity depends. The fault is not that of individuals, but of a system, of Industrialism itself. During the greater part of the nineteenth century industry was driven by two forces, hunger and fear, and the employer commanded them both. He could grant or withhold employment as he pleased. If men revolted against his terms he could dismiss them, and if they were dismissed what confronted them was starvation or the workhouse. Authority was centralized; its instruments were passive; the one thing which they dreaded was unemployment. And since they could neither prevent its occurrence nor do more than a little to mitigate its horrors when it occurred, they submitted to a discipline which they could not resist, and industry pursued its course through their passive acquiescence in a power which could crush them individually if they attempted to oppose it.

That system might be lauded as efficient or denounced as inhuman. But, at least, as its admirers were never tired of pointing out, it worked. And, like the Prussian State, which alike in its virtues and deficiencies it not a little resembled, as long as it worked it survived denunciations of its methods, as a strong man will throw off a disease. But today it is ceasing to have even the qualities of its defects. It is ceasing to be efficient. It no longer secures the ever-increasing output of wealth which it offered in its golden prime, and which enabled it to silence criticism by an imposing spectacle of material success. Though it still works, it works unevenly, amid constant friction and jolts and stoppages, without the confidence of the public and without full confidence even in itself, a tyrant who must intrigue and cajole where formerly he commanded, a gaoler who, if not yet deprived of whip, dare only administer moderate chastisement, and who, though he still protests that he alone can keep the treadmill moving and get the corn ground, is compelled to surrender so much of his authority as to make it questionable whether he is worth his keep. For the instruments through which Capitalism exercised discipline are one by one being taken from it. It cannot pay what wages it likes or work what hours it likes. In well-organized industries the power of arbitrary dismissal, the very center of its authority, is being shaken, because men will no longer tolerate a system which makes their livelihood dependent on the caprices of an individual. In all industries alike the time is not far distant when the dread of starvation can no longer be used to cow dissatisfied workers into submission, because the public will no longer allow involuntary unemployment to result in starvation.

And if Capitalism is losing its control of men’s bodies, still more has it lost its command of their minds. The product of a civilization which regarded “the poor” as instruments, at worst of the luxuries, at best of the virtues, of the rich, its psychological foundation fifty years ago was an ignorance in the mass of mankind which led them to reverence as wisdom the very follies of their masters, and an almost animal incapacity for responsibility. Education and experience have destroyed the passivity which was the condition of the perpetuation of industrial government in the hands of an oligarchy of private capitalists. The workman of today has as little belief in the intellectual superiority of many of those who direct industry as he has in the morality of the system. It appears to him to be not only oppressive, but wasteful, unintelligent and inefficient. In the light of his own experience in the factory and the mine, he regards the claim of the capitalist to be the self-appointed guardian of public interests as a piece of sanctimonious hypocrisy. For he sees every day that efficiency is sacrificed to shortsighted financial interests; and while as a man he is outraged by the inhumanity of the industrial order, as a professional who knows the difference between good work and bad he has a growing contempt at once for its misplaced parsimony and its misplaced extravagance, for the whole apparatus of adulteration, advertisement and quackery which seems inseparable from the pursuit of profit as the main standard of industrial success.

So Capitalism no longer secures strenuous work by fear, for it is ceasing to be formidable. And it cannot secure it by respect, for it has ceased to be respected. And the very victories by which it seeks to reassert its waning prestige are more disastrous than defeats. Employers may congratulate themselves that they have maintained intact their right to freedom of management, or opposed successfully a demand for public ownership, or broken a movement for higher wages and shorter hours. But what is success in a trade dispute or in a political struggle is often a defeat in the workshop: the workmen may have lost, but it does not follow that their employers, still less that the public, which is principally composed of workmen, have won. For the object of industry is to produce goods, and to produce them at the lowest cost in human effort. But there is no alchemy which will secure efficient production from the resentment or distrust of men who feel contempt for the order under which they work. It is a commonplace that credit is the foundation of industry. But credit is a matter of psychology, and the workman has his psychology as well as the capitalist. If confidence is necessary to the investment of capital, confidence is not less necessary to the effective performance of labor by men whose sole livelihood depends upon it. If they are not yet strong enough to impose their will, they are strong enough to resist when their masters would impose theirs. They may work rather than strike. But they will work to escape dismissal, not for the greater glory of a system in which they do not believe; and, if they are dismissed, those who take their place will do the same.

That this is one cause of a low output has been stated both by employers and workers in the building industry, and by the representatives of the miners before the Coal Commission. It was reiterated with impressive emphasis by Mr. Justice Sankey. Nor is it seriously contested by employers themselves. What else, indeed, do their repeated denunciations of “restriction of output” mean except that they have failed to organize industry so as to secure the efficient service which it is their special function to provide? Nor is it appropriate to the situation to indulge in full-blooded denunciations of the “selfishness” of the working classes. “To draw an indictment against a whole nation” is a procedure which is as impossible in industry as it is in politics. Institutions must be adapted to human nature, not human nature to institutions. If the effect of the industrial system is such that a large and increasing number of ordinary men and women find that it offers them no adequate motive for economic effort, it is mere pedantry to denounce men and women instead of amending the system.

Thus the time has come when absolutism in industry may still win its battles, but loses the campaign, and loses it on the very ground of economic efficiency which was of its own selection. In the period of transition, while economic activity is distracted by the struggle between those who have the name and habit of power, but no longer the full reality of it, and those who are daily winning more of the reality of power but are not yet its recognized repositories, it is the consumer who suffers. He has neither the service of docile obedience, nor the service of intelligent cooperation. For slavery will work⁠—as long as the slaves will let it; and freedom will work when men have learned to be free; but what will not work is a combination of the two. So the public goes short of coal not only because of the technical deficiencies of the system under which it is raised and distributed, but because the system itself has lost its driving force⁠—because the coal owners can no longer persuade the miners into producing more dividends for them and more royalties for the owners of minerals, while the public cannot appeal to them to put their whole power into serving itself, because it has chosen that they should be the servants, not of itself, but of shareholders.

And, this dilemma is not, as some suppose, temporary, the aftermath of war, or peculiar to the coal industry, as though the miners alone were the children of sin which in the last few months they have been described to be. It is permanent; it has spread far; and, as sleeping spirits are stirred into life by education and one industry after another develops a strong corporate consciousness, it will spread further. Nor will it be resolved by lamentations or menaces or denunciations of leaders whose only significance is that they say openly what plain men feel privately. For the matter at bottom is one of psychology. What has happened is that the motives on which the industrial system relied for several generations to secure efficiency, secure it no longer. And it is as impossible to restore them, to revive by mere exhortation the complex of hopes and fears and ignorance and patient credulity and passive acquiescence, which together made men, fifty years ago, plastic instruments in the hands of industrialism, as to restore innocence to any others of those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge.

The ideal of some intelligent and respectable business men, the restoration of the golden sixties, when workmen were docile and confiding, and trade unions were still half illegal, and foreign competition meant English competition in foreign countries, and prices were rising a little and not rising too much, is the one Utopia which can never be realized. The King may walk naked as long as his courtiers protest that he is clad; but when a child or a fool has broken the spell a tailor is more important than all their admiration. If the public, which suffers from the slackening of economic activity, desires to end its malaise, it will not laud as admirable and all-sufficient the operation of motives which are plainly ceasing to move. It will seek to liberate new motives and to enlist them in its service. It will endeavor to find an alternative to incentives which were always degrading, to those who used them as much as to those upon whom they were used, and which now are adequate incentives no longer. And the alternative to the discipline which Capitalism exercised through its instruments of unemployment and starvation is the self-discipline of responsibility and professional pride.

So the demand which aims at stronger organization, fuller responsibility, larger powers for the sake of the producer as a condition of economic liberty, the demand for freedom, is not antithetic to the demand for more effective work and increased output which is being made in the interests of the consumer. It is complementary to it, as the insistence by a body of professional men, whether doctors or university teachers, on the maintenance of their professional independence and dignity against attempts to cheapen the service is not hostile to an efficient service, but, in the long run, a condition of it. The course of wisdom for the consumer would be to hasten, so far as he can, the transition. For, as at present conducted, industry is working against the grain. It is compassing sea and land in its efforts to overcome, by ingenious financial and technical expedients, obstacles which should never have existed. It is trying to produce its results by conquering professional feeling instead of using it. It is carrying not only its inevitable economic burdens, but an ever increasing load of ill will and skepticism. It has in fact “shot the bird which caused the wind to blow” and goes about its business with the corpse round its neck. Compared with that psychological incubus, the technical deficiencies of industry, serious though they often are, are a bagatelle, and the business men who preach the gospel of production without offering any plan for dealing with what is now the central fact in the economic situation, resemble a Christian apologist who should avoid disturbing the equanimity of his audience by carefully omitting all reference either to the fall of man or the scheme of salvation. If it is desired to increase the output of wealth, it is not a paradox, but the statement of an elementary economic truism to say that active and constructive cooperation on the part of the rank and file of workers would do more to contribute to that result than the discovery of a new coalfield or a generation of scientific invention.

The first condition of enlisting on the side of constructive work the professional feeling which is now apathetic, or even hostile to it, is to secure that when it is given its results accrue to the public, not to the owner of property in capital, in land, or in other resources. For this reason the attenuation of the rights at present involved in the private ownership of industrial capital, or their complete abolition, is not the demand of idealogues, but an indispensable element in a policy of economic efficiency, since it is the condition of the most effective functioning of the human beings upon whom, though, like other truisms, it is often forgotten, economic efficiency ultimately depends. But it is only one element. Cooperation may range from mere acquiescence to a vigilant and zealous initiative. The criterion of an effective system of administration is that it should succeed in enlisting in the conduct of industry the latent forces of professional pride to which the present industrial order makes little appeal, and which, indeed, Capitalism, in its war upon trade union organization, endeavored for many years to stamp out altogether.

Nor does the efficacy of such an appeal repose upon the assumption of that “change in human nature,” which is the triumphant reductio ad absurdum advanced by those who are least satisfied with the working of human nature as it is. What it does involve is that certain elementary facts should be taken into account, instead of, as at present, being ignored. That all work is distasteful and that “every man desires to secure the largest income with the least effort” may be as axiomatic as it is assumed to be. But in practice it makes all the difference to the attitude of the individual whether the collective sentiment of the group to which he belongs is on the side of effort or against it, and what standard of effort it sets. That, as employers complain, the public opinion of considerable groups of workers is against an intensification of effort as long as part of its result is increased dividends for shareholders, is no doubt, as far as mere efficiency is concerned, the gravest indictment of the existing industrial order. But, even when public ownership has taken the place of private capitalism, its ability to command effective service will depend ultimately upon its success in securing not merely that professional feeling is no longer an opposing force, but that it is actively enlisted upon the side of maintaining the highest possible standard of efficiency which can reasonably be demanded.

To put the matter concretely, while the existing ownership of mines is a positive inducement to inefficient work, public ownership administered by a bureaucracy, if it would remove the technical deficiencies emphasized by Sir Richard Redmayne as inseparable from the separate administration of 3,000 pits by 1,500 different companies, would be only too likely to miss a capital advantage which a different type of administration would secure. It would lose both the assistance to be derived from the technical knowledge of practical men who know by daily experience the points at which the details of administration can be improved, and the stimulus to efficiency springing from the corporate pride of a profession which is responsible for maintaining and improving the character of its service. Professional spirit is a force like gravitation, which in itself is neither good nor bad, but which the engineer uses, when he can, to do his work for him. If it is foolish to idealize it, it is equally shortsighted to neglect it. In what are described par excellence as “the services” it has always been recognized that esprit de corps is the foundation of efficiency, and all means, some wise and some mischievous, are used to encourage it: in practice, indeed, the power upon which the country relied as its main safeguard in an emergency was the professional zeal of the navy and nothing else. Nor is that spirit peculiar to the professions which are concerned with war. It is a matter of common training, common responsibilities, and common dangers. In all cases where difficult and disagreeable work is to be done, the force which elicits it is normally not merely money, but the public opinion and tradition of the little society in which the individual moves, and in the esteem of which he finds that which men value in success.

To ignore that most powerful of stimuli as it is ignored today, and then to lament that the efforts which it produces are not forthcoming, is the climax of perversity. To aim at eliminating from industry the growth and action of corporate feeling, for fear lest an organized body of producers should exploit the public, is a plausible policy. But it is shortsighted. It is “to pour away the baby with the bath,” and to lower the quality of the service in an attempt to safeguard it. A wise system of administration would recognize that professional solidarity can do much of its work for it more effectively than it can do it itself, because the spirit of his profession is part of the individual and not a force outside him, and would make it its object to enlist that temper in the public service. It is only by that policy, indeed, that the elaboration of cumbrous regulations to prevent men doing what they should not, with the incidental result of sometimes preventing them from doing what they should⁠—it is only by that policy that what is mechanical and obstructive in bureaucracy can be averted. For industry cannot run without laws. It must either control itself by professional standards, or it must be controlled by officials who are not of the craft and who, however zealous and well-meaning, can hardly have the feel of it in their fingers. Public control and criticism are indispensable. But they should not be too detailed, or they defeat themselves. It would be better that, once fair standards have been established, the professional organization should check offenses against prices and quality than that it should be necessary for the State to do so. The alternative to minute external supervision is supervision from within by men who become imbued with the public obligations of their trade in the very process of learning it. It is, in short, professional in industry.

For this reason collectivism by itself is too simple a solution. Its failure is likely to be that of other rationalist systems.

“Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand,
Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band.”

If industrial reorganization is to be a living reality, and not merely a plan upon paper, its aim must be to secure not only that industry is carried on for the service of the public, but that it shall be carried on with the active cooperation of the organizations of producers. But cooperation involves responsibility, and responsibility involves power. It is idle to expect that men will give their best to any system which they do not trust, or that they will trust any system in the control of which they do not share. Their ability to carry professional obligations depends upon the power which they possess to remove the obstacles which prevent those obligations from being discharged, and upon their willingness, when they possess the power, to use it.

Two causes appear to have hampered the committees which were established in connection with coal mines during the war to increase the output of coal. One was the reluctance of some of them to discharge the invidious task of imposing penalties for absenteeism on their fellow-workmen. The other was the exclusion of faults of management from the control of many committees. In some cases all went well till they demanded that, if the miners were penalized for absenteeism which was due to them, the management should be penalized similarly when men who desired to work were sent home because, as a result of defective organization, there was no work for them to do. Their demand was resisted as “interference with the management,” and the attempt to enforce regularity of attendance broke down. Nor, to take another example from the same industry, is it to be expected that the weight of the miners’ organization will be thrown on to the side of greater production, if it has no power to insist on the removal of the defects of equipment and organization, the shortage of trams, rails, tubs and timber, the “creaming” of the pits by the working of easily got coal to their future detriment, their wasteful layout caused by the vagaries of separate ownership, by which at present the output is reduced.

The public cannot have it both ways. If it allows workmen to be treated as “hands” it cannot claim the service of their wills and their brains. If it desires them to show the zeal of skilled professionals, it must secure that they have sufficient power to allow of their discharging professional responsibilities. In order that workmen may abolish any restrictions on output which may be imposed by them, they must be able to insist on the abolition of the restrictions, more mischievous because more effective, which, as the Committee on Trusts has recently told us, are imposed by organizations of employers. In order that the miners’ leaders, instead of merely bargaining as to wages, hours and working conditions, may be able to appeal to their members to increase the supply of coal, they must be in a position to secure the removal of the causes of low output which are due to the deficiencies of the management, and which are today a far more serious obstacle than any reluctance on the part of the miner. If the workmen in the building trade are to take combined action to accelerate production, they must as a body be consulted as to the purpose to which their energy is to be applied, and must not be expected to build fashionable houses, when what are required are six-roomed cottages to house families which are at present living with three persons to a room.

It is deplorable, indeed, that any human beings should consent to degrade themselves by producing the articles which a considerable number of workmen turn out today, boots which are partly brown paper, and furniture which is not fit to use. The revenge of outraged humanity is certain, though it is not always obvious; and the penalty paid by the consumer for tolerating an organization of industry which, in the name of efficiency, destroyed the responsibility of the workman, is that the service with which he is provided is not even efficient. He has always paid it, though he has not seen it, in quality. Today he is beginning to realize that he is likely to pay it in quantity as well. If the public is to get efficient service, it can get it only from human beings, with the initiative and caprices of human beings. It will get it, in short, in so far as it treats industry as a responsible profession.

The collective responsibility of the workers for the maintenance of the standards of their profession is, then, the alternative to the discipline which Capitalism exercised in the past, and which is now breaking down. It involves a fundamental change in the position both of employers and of trade unions. As long as the direction of industry is in the hands of property-owners or their agents, who are concerned to extract from it the maximum profit for themselves, a trade union is necessarily a defensive organization. Absorbed, on the one hand, in the struggle to resist the downward thrust of Capitalism upon the workers’ standard of life, and denounced, on the other, if it presumes, to “interfere with management,” even when management is most obviously inefficient, it is an opposition which never becomes a government and which has neither the will nor the power to assume responsibility for the quality of the service offered to the consumer. If the abolition of functionless property transferred the control of production to bodies representing those who perform constructive work and those who consume the goods produced, the relation of the worker to the public would no longer be indirect but immediate, and associations which are now purely defensive would be in a position not merely to criticize and oppose but to advise, to initiate and to enforce upon their own members the obligations of the craft.

It is obvious that in such circumstances the service offered the consumer, however carefully safeguarded by his representation on the authorities controlling each industry, would depend primarily upon the success of professional organizations in finding a substitute for the discipline exercised today by the agents of property-owners. It would be necessary for them to maintain by their own action the zeal, efficiency and professional pride which, when the barbarous weapons of the nineteenth century have been discarded, would be the only guarantee of a high level of production. Nor, once this new function has been made possible for professional organizations, is there any extravagance in expecting them to perform it with reasonable competence. How far economic motives are balked today and could be strengthened by a different type of industrial organization, to what extent, and under what conditions, it is possible to enlist in the services of industry motives which are not purely economic, can be ascertained only after a study of the psychology of work which has not yet been made. Such a study, to be of value, must start by abandoning the conventional assumptions, popularized by economic textbooks and accepted as self-evident by practical men, that the motives to effort are simple and constant in character, like the pressure of steam in a boiler, that they are identical throughout all ranges of economic activity, from the stock exchange to the shunting of wagons or laying of bricks, and that they can be elicited and strengthened only by directly economic incentives. In so far as motives in industry have been considered hitherto, it has usually been done by writers who, like most exponents of scientific management, have started by assuming that the categories of business psychology could be offered with equal success to all classes of workers and to all types of productive work. Those categories appear to be derived from a simplified analysis of the mental processes of the company promoter, financier or investor, and their validity as an interpretation of the motives and habits which determine the attitude to his work of the bricklayer, the miner, the dock laborer or the engineer, is precisely the point in question.

Clearly there are certain types of industry to which they are only partially relevant. It can hardly be assumed, for example, that the degree of skill and energy brought to his work by a surgeon, a scientific investigator, a teacher, a medical officer of health, an Indian civil servant and a peasant proprietor are capable of being expressed precisely and to the same degree in terms of the economic advantage which those different occupations offer. Obviously those who pursue them are influenced to some considerable, though uncertain, extent by economic incentives. Obviously, again, the precise character of each process or step in the exercise of their respective avocations, the performance of an operation, the carrying out of a piece of investigation, the selection of a particular type of educational method, the preparation of a report, the decision of a case or the care of live stock, is not immediately dependent upon an exact calculation of pecuniary gain or loss. What appears to be the case is that in certain walks of life, while the occupation is chosen after a consideration of its economic advantages, and while economic reasons exact the minimum degree of activity needed to avert dismissal from it or “failure,” the actual level of energy or proficiency displayed depend largely upon conditions of a different order. Among them are the character of the training received before and after entering the occupation, the customary standard of effort demanded by the public opinion of one’s fellows, the desire for the esteem of the small circle in which the individual moves and to be recognized as having “made good” and not to have “failed,” interest in one’s work, ranging from devotion to a determination to “do justice” to it, the pride of the craftsman, the “tradition of the service.”

It would be foolish to suggest that any considerable body of men are uninfluenced by economic considerations. But to represent them as amenable to such incentives only is to give a quite unreal and bookish picture of the actual conditions under which the work of the world is carried on. How large a part such considerations play varies from one occupation to another, according to the character of the work which it does and the manner in which it is organized. In what is called par excellence industry, calculations of pecuniary gain and loss are more powerful than in most of the so-called professions, though even in industry they are more constantly present to the minds of the business men who “direct” it, than to those of the managers and technicians, most of whom are paid fixed salaries, or to the rank and file of wage-workers. In the professions of teaching and medicine, in many branches of the public service, the necessary qualities are secured, without the intervention of the capitalist employer, partly by pecuniary incentives, partly by training and education, partly by the acceptance on the part of those entering them of the traditional obligations of their profession as part of the normal framework of their working lives. But this difference is not constant and unalterable. It springs from the manner in which different types of occupation are organized, on the training which they offer, and the morale which they cultivate among their members. The psychology of a vocation can in fact be changed; new motives can be elicited, provided steps are taken to allow them free expression. It is as feasible to turn building into an organized profession, with a relatively high code of public honor, as it was to do the same for medicine or teaching.

The truth is that we ought radically to revise the presuppositions as to human motives on which current presentations of economic theory are ordinarily founded and in terms of which the discussion of economic question is usually carried on. The assumption that the stimulus of imminent personal want is either the only spur, or a sufficient spur, to productive effort is a relic of a crude psychology which has little warrant either in past history or in present experience. It derives what plausibility it possesses from a confusion between work in the sense of the lowest quantum of activity needed to escape actual starvation, and the work which is given, irrespective of the fact that elementary wants may already have been satisfied, through the natural disposition of ordinary men to maintain, and of extraordinary men to improve upon, the level of exertion accepted as reasonable by the public opinion of the group of which they are members. It is the old difference, forgotten by society as often as it is learned, between the labor of the free man and that of the slave. Economic fear may secure the minimum effort needed to escape economic penalties. What, however, has made progress possible in the past, and what, it may be suggested, matters to the world today, is not the bare minimum which is required to avoid actual want, but the capacity of men to bring to bear upon their tasks a degree of energy, which, while it can be stimulated by economic incentives, yields results far in excess of any which are necessary merely to avoid the extremes of hunger or destitution.

That capacity is a matter of training, tradition and habit, at least as much as of pecuniary stimulus, and the ability of a professional association representing the public opinion of a group of workers to raise it is, therefore, considerable. Once industry has been liberated from its subservience to the interests of the functionless property-owner, it is in this sphere that trade unions may be expected increasingly to find their function. Its importance both for the general interests of the community and for the special interests of particular groups of workers can hardly be exaggerated. Technical knowledge and managerial skill are likely to be available as readily for a committee appointed by the workers in an industry as for a committee appointed, as now, by the shareholders. But it is more and more evident today that the crux of the economic situation is not the technical deficiencies of industrial organization, but the growing inability of those who direct industry to command the active good will of the personnel. Their cooperation is promised by the conversion of industry into a profession serving the public, and promised, as far as can be judged, by that alone.

Nor is the assumption of the new and often disagreeable obligations of internal discipline and public responsibility one which trade unionism can afford, once the change is accomplished, to shirk, however alien they may be to its present traditions. For ultimately, if by slow degrees, power follows the ability to wield it; authority goes with function. The workers cannot have it both ways. They must choose whether to assume the responsibility for industrial discipline and become free, or to repudiate it and continue to be serfs. If, organized as professional bodies, they can provide a more effective service than that which is now, with increasing difficulty, extorted by the agents of capital, they will have made good their hold upon the future. If they cannot, they will remain among the less calculable instruments of production which many of them are today. The instinct of mankind warns it against accepting at their face value spiritual demands which cannot justify themselves by practical achievements. And the road along which the organized workers, like any other class, must climb to power, starts from the provision of a more effective economic service than their masters, as their grip upon industry becomes increasingly vacillating and uncertain, are able to supply.