as Mr and Mrs Webb, who at least merit the respect due to those who have given lives of work to supporting a cause which they believe to be sound and in the best interests of mankind.  But in spite of their chronic and sometimes ill-mannered facetiousness at the expense of State Socialism and its advocates, the Guild Socialists, as we shall see, have to rely on State control for very important wheels in their machinery and leave gaps in it which, as far as disinterested observers can see, can only be filled by still further help from the discredited State.  It is no disparagement of the efforts of these writers and thinkers to say that their sketch of the system that they hope to see built up is somewhat hazy.  That is inevitable.  They are groping towards a new social and economic order which, in their hope and belief, would be an improvement.  To expect them to work it out in every detail would be to ask them to commit an absurdity.  The thing would have to grow as it developed, and we can only ask them to show us a main outline.  This has been done in many publications, among which I have studied, with as much care as these distracting times allow, “Self-Government in Industry,” by G.D.H.  Cole, “National Guilds,” by A.R.  Orage (so described on the back of the book, but the title-page says that it is by S.G.  Hobson, edited by A.R.  Orage), and “The Meaning of National Guilds,” by C.E.  Bechhofer and M.B.  Reckitt.

These authorities seem to agree in thinking (1) that the capitalist is a thief, (2) that the manual worker is a wage slave, (3) that freedom (in the sense of being able to work as he likes) is every man’s rightful birthright, and (4) that this freedom is to be achieved through the establishment of National Guilds.  As to (1) Messrs Bechhofer and Reckitt speak on page 99 of their book of the “felony of Capitalism” as a matter that need not be argued about.  Mr Cole makes the same assumption by observing on page 235 of the work already mentioned that “to do good work for a capitalist employer is merely, if we view the situation rationally, to help a thief to steal more successfully.”  Well, this view of capital and the capitalist may be true.  Mr Cole is a highly educated and gifted gentleman, and a Fellow of Magdalen.  He may have expounded and proved this point in some work that I have not been fortunate enough to read.  But as the abolition of the capitalist is one of the chief aims put forward by these writers it seems a pity that they should thus first assert that he is a thief to be stamped out, instead of explaining the matter to old-fashioned folk who believe that capitalists are, in the main, the people (or representatives of the people) who have equipped industry, and enormously multiplied its efficiency and output, and so have enabled the greater part of the existing population of this country (and most others) to come into being.  But to the Guild Socialists the identity of robbery with capitalism seems to be so self-evident that it