The Acquisitive Society by R.H. Tawney

What form of management should replace the administration of industry by the agents of shareholders? What is most likely to hold it to its main purpose, and to be least at the mercy of predatory interests and functionless supernumeraries, and of the alternations of sullen dissatisfaction and spasmodic revolt which at present distract it? Whatever the system upon which industry is administered, one thing is certain. Its economic processes and results must be public, because only if they are public can it be known whether the service of industry is vigilant, effective and honorable, whether its purpose is being realized and its function carried out. The defense of secrecy in business resembles the defense of adulteration on the ground that it is a legitimate weapon of competition; indeed it has even less justification than that famous doctrine, for the condition of effective competition is publicity, and one motive for secrecy is to prevent it.

Those who conduct industry at the present time and who are most emphatic that, as the Duke of Wellington said of the unreformed House of Commons, they "have never read or heard of any measure up to the present moment which can in any degree satisfy the mind" that the method of conducting it can in any way be improved, are also those apparently who, with some honorable exceptions, are most reluctant that the full facts about it should be known. And it is crucial that they should be known. It is crucial not only because, in the present ignorance of the real economic situation, all industrial disagreements tend inevitably to be battles in the dark, in which "ignorant armies clash by night," but because, unless there is complete publicity as to profits and costs, it is impossible to form any judgment either of the reasonableness of the prices which are charged or of the claims to remuneration of the different parties engaged in production. For balance sheets, with their opportunities for concealing profits, give no clear light upon the first, and no light at all upon the second. And so, when the facts come out, the public is aghast at revelations which show that industry is conducted with bewildering financial extravagance. If the full facts had been published, as they should have been, quarter by quarter, these revelations would probably not have been made at all, because publicity itself would have been an antiseptic and there would have been nothing sensational to reveal.