"But the citizen also has relations with the public stores from which he supplies his needs?"
"Certainly, but not a relation of account. As your people would have said, all purchases are for cash only--that is, on the credit card."
"There remains," I persisted, "the accounting for goods and services between the stores and the productive departments and between the several departments."
"Certainly; but the whole system being under one head and all the parts working together with no friction and no motive for any indirection, such accounting is child's work compared with the adjustment of dealings between the mutually suspicious private capitalists, who divided among themselves the field of business in your day, and sat up nights devising tricks to deceive, defeat, and overreach one anoth
