needs no proof.  Next, as to the wage system.  They seem to think that to earn a wage is slavery and degradation, but to receive pay is freedom.  With the best will in the world I have tried to see where this immense difference between the use of two words, which seem to me to mean much the same thing, comes in in their view, but I have not succeeded.  Perhaps you will be able to if I give you Mr Cole’s own words.

On page 154 of the book cited, he says that the wage system is “the root of the whole tyranny of capitalism,” and then continues: 

“There are four distinguishing marks of the wage system upon which National Guildsmen are accustomed to fix their attention.  Let me set them out clearly in the simplest terms,

“1.  The wage system abstracts ‘labour’ from the labourer, so that the one can be bought and sold apart from the other.

“2.  Consequently, wages are paid to the wage worker only when it is profitable to the capitalist to employ his labour.

“3.  The wage worker, in return for his wage, surrenders all control over the organisation of production.

“4.  The wage worker, in return for his wage, surrenders all claim upon the product of his labour.

“If the wage system is to be abolished, all these four marks of degraded status must be removed.  National Guilds, then, must assure to the worker, at least, the following things:—­

“1.  Recognition and payment as a human being, and not merely as a mortal tenement of so much labour power for which an efficient demand exists.

“2.  Consequently, payment in employment and in unemployment, in sickness and in health alike.

“3.  Control of the organisation of production in co-operation with his fellows.

“4.  A claim upon the product of his work, also exercised in co-operation with his fellows.”

Now, looking with a most dispassionate eye and an eager desire to find out what it is that Labour and its spokesmen are grouping after, can one find in these “marks of degraded status” any serious evil, or anything that is capable of remedy under any conceivable economic system?  In all of them the wage-earner is on exactly the same footing as the salary-earner or the professional piece-worker.  The labour of the manager of the works can also be abstracted from the manager, and can be bought and sold apart from him.  One would have thought that this fact is rather in favour of the manager and of the wage-earner—­or would Mr. Cole prefer that the latter should be bought and sold himself?  The salary-earner and the professional are only employed when somebody wants them.  The manager’s term of employment is longer, but the professional pieceworker, such as I am when I write this article, has usually no contracted term, and is only paid for actual work done.  I also have no control over the organisation of the production of Sperling’s Journal or any other paper for which I do piecework.