is much hope of this happening, at any rate for many years, and in the meantime any community which subjected itself to state socialism might find itself very much worse off. It is true that during the World War great feats were achieved by govern- ment departments in organizing the supply of food and of war munitions, but they were achieved because the spirit of the na- tion was stirred to meet the most momentous crisis in its history; and because government departments were able to rely upon the assistance and experience of a large number of men who came to work in them, who had been trained in the school of practical business based on the incentive of private profit. And even so, these official achievements during the war were only carried out at a cost which the country could not possibly have stood except for a comparatively short time; they also involved continual friction between government departments and the wage-earners whom they employed, and their general results were so unsatisfactory that it is now a commonplace, even among labour leaders who are most anxious to nationalize industry, that whatever happens " bureaucratic control " must not be allowed to take charge. " Government departments are in the worst of bad odours just now, and nothing which seemed to involve an extension of bureaucracy would have a chance at the polls " so writes Mr. Gerald Gould, one of the latest exponents of socialist ambitions, in The Coming Revolution in Great Britain, published in 1920. How it is possible to organize nationalized industry without bureaucratic control has not yet been shown. Nationalization. The nearest attempt at solving this problem is made by the syndicalists and guild socialists, who do so by giving the nation remarkably little to say in the conduct of industry. Syndicalism in fact seems, as far as one can make out from the shadowy sketches that are obtainable of the desires of its champions, to ignore the state altogether. It proposes that the workers in any industry should seize the industry's capital equipment for themselves and work it for themselves. It is difficult to see how such a scheme could possibly be worked in practice. With each industry its own master there does not seem to be any means of arriving at any common denominator for the exchange of their products, that is to say, of arriving at a price, and the question of the provision of further capital seems to have been left out altogether. Guild socialism seems to be an attempt to reconcile syndicalism and state socialism and to arrive at a working compromise by a compound of the two. Unfortunately, its schemes as at present expounded seem rather more likely to suffer from a mixture of the drawbacks of both systems. The guild socialists consider that the capital equipment of industry should be owned by the state, but that the whole organization of industry, the decision as to what is to be produced, and the control of the product, are to be in the hands of those who work in it with brain or with hand. Here again we have the difficulty as to how we are to arrive at a means of exchange between one guild and another. If the shirt-making guild thinks that its members ought to get a pair of boots in exchange for two shirts, while the boot-making industry thinks that a pair of boots ought to be exchanged for three shirts, who is to decide between them and what power is to enforce decision? In the exceedingly vague sketches of the guild systems that have been produced by their champions, some attempts have been made to answer these questions. It is suggested that there would have to be a guild parliament representing all the guilds, a state parliament repre- senting the consumers, and apparently yet another parliament which is to settle matters when these two parliaments cannot agree. Obviously there are materials here for economic chaos. It is true that if everybody worked with a perfectly angelic spirit such a system might possibly be able to carry on the work of production, but if everybody had an angelic spirit any system, even capitalism, would also be highly successful. But the guild socialists have to admit that, if any particular guild which was strong enough chose to hold a pistol at the head of the rest of the community by refusing to work except on its own terms, serious difficulty would arise. In fact, some of its more candid advocates have stated frankly that the wage-earners might conceivably be a good deal worse off under guild socialism; but they seem to
think that a diminution in their actual control of goods and comforts would be more than compensated by the greater free- dom they would enjoy, and by the feeling that they were no longer working to profit a private capitalist.
Economic Tyranny. How much truth is there in this claim for the greater freedom to be enjoyed by the wage-earners under guild socialism? One of the principles on which its champions most strongly insist is that production and the control of the product are to be in the hands of the guildsmen themselves, and that, consequently, they will be able to insist on producing goods which they think should be produced, rather than goods which consumers would prefer to consume. One of their champions, Mr. G. D. H. Cole, even goes so far as to mention the right to " choose whether they will make well or ill " as one of the things which must be secured for the workers under guild socialism. Certainly the right to work well or ill is a very large extension of freedom of a kind, but is it likely to react in favour of freedom in the fullest sense of the word? As industry is now organized under the principle of the division of labour, every one of us produces or helps to produce one article or fraction of one article, but we consume hundreds of articles. Economic freedom, that is to say, freedom to provide ourselves with such goods as we should like to consume, thus seems to be much more real under capitalism, which gives us the right to spend our wages and salaries as we please, than it would be under state socialism or guild socialism. State socialism would tell us what work to do and what goods to consume; and guild socialism, though apparently leaving to us, when once members of a guild, the right to decide along with our fellows concerning the goods that we will produce, and also as to whether we will work well or ill, would nevertheless leave us dependent upon the decisions of the other guilds as to what kind of goods they chose to produce, and upon the inclination to work well or to meet our demands with shoddy and ill-made commodities. Since this is the kind of freedom which is held out to the wage-earners under these rival systems, there certainly seems to be good reason why they should think many times before taking a leap in the dark by adopting them.
Capitalism and Progress. Such are the doubts and difficulties that face us when we contemplate the practical working of any alternative so far suggested to capitalism. For it, on the other hand, we can at least claim that, with all its faults, it has achieved a marvellous improvement in the command of man over natural forces; and has produced an enormously greater amount of wealth, which has been distributed, though in a manner which leaves a good deal to be desired, over a greatly increased population. Along with this purely material improvement there has proceeded a great expansion in education, sanitation and social reform. Capitalism can certainly lay no direct claim to the whole of this expansion, a great deal of which has been brought about, in spite of the opposition of the propertied classes, by a few en- thusiasts, educational and scientific; but capitalism can fairly claim that these enthusiasts could not have done their work if there had not been available the surplus supply of wealth which was called into being by the efforts of private enterprise working with the incentive of profit. A noted labour leader has recently said that capitalism has made England a " C.3 " nation. But this description is more rhetorical than accurate. England's achievements by land and sea, during the World War, and like- wise those of her Allies and enemies, who had also developed their resources under a capitalistic system, were such as to astonish those who had anticipated that the drift of the popula- tions into great towns, and their occupation under sedentary conditions, would make it difficult to find armies who could fight with the spirit in which armies fought in former days. In fact, armies were produced in proportion to the population on a scale previously undreamt of, and fought an almost continuous battle for four years, showing unprecedented courage under conditions that no armies had hitherto been asked to face. The spirit and physical power of the countries which have grown into material greatness under the capitalistic system certainly show no sign of demoralization. At the same time it is true, as has already been admitted, that the blot of destitution is one which has to be
