by substituting something better than our existing industrial system. He would be very blind to the future who, in the twentieth century, attempted to dismiss such an idea off-hand without impartial consideration. For clearly, if labour can, by abolishing our present industrial system, improve matters decidedly, then England will agree to such a proposition.
It has been indicated already that, putting sheer disorder and autocracy aside at once, there are three various solutions of our industrial position which have commended themselves to labour. These have been trade unionism, socialism, and syndicalism. Trade unionism, however, recognises capital and the existing order, and would work with them. It has been the breakdown of trade unionism before forces alien to itself that has made way for all this trouble, for trade unionism, purged of socialism and syndicalism, works well with the existing system. Accordingly, the only new constructive solutions of our problem that remain for labour to impose, once it is in power, are socialism and syndicalism, that is, the possession of all industry by the State, and, alternatively, by labour itself.
Therefore, in order to see whether any such schemes will prove acceptable in the future to the English people, we must compare them with our existing industrial system, to know whether the latter is doomed to die.
