The solution of the industrial and economic problem that now confronts the entire world with an insistence that is not to be denied, is contingent on the restoration, first of all, of the holiness and the joy of work. Labour is not a curse, it is rather one of the greatest of the earthly blessings of man, provided its sanctity is recognized and its performance is accomplished with satisfaction to the labourer. In work man creates, whether the product is a bushel of potatoes from a space of once arid ground, or whether it is the Taj Mahal, Westminster Abbey or the Constitution of the United States, and so working he partakes something of the divine power of creation.

When work is subject to slavery, all sense of its holiness is lost, both by master and bondman; when it is subject to the factory system all the joy in labour is lost. Ingenuity may devise one clever panacea after another for the salving work and for lifting the working classes from the intolerable conditions that have prevailed for more than a century; they will be ephemeral in their existence and futile in their results unless sense of holiness is restored, and the joy in production and creation given back to those who have been defrauded.

Before Christianity prevailed slavery was universal in civilized communities, labour, as conducted under that regime, was a curse, and this at length came home to roost on the gaunt wreckage of imperialism. Thereafter came slowly increasing liberty under the feudal system with its small social units and its system of production for use not profits, monasticism with its doctrine and practice of the sanctity of work, and the Church with its progressive emancipation of the spiritual part of man. Work was not easy, on the contrary it was very hard throughout the Dark Ages and Mediaevalism, but there is no particular merit in easy work. It was virtually free except for the labour and contributions in kind exacted by the over-lord (less in proportion than taxes in money have been at several times since) from the workers on the soil, and in the crafts of every kind redeemed from undue arduousness by the joy that comes from doing a thing well and producing something of beauty, originality and technical perfection.

The period during which work possessed the most honourable status and the joy in work was the greatest, extends from the beginnings of the twelfth century well into the sixteenth. In some centuries, and along certain lines of activity, it continued much longer, notably in England and the United States, but social and industrial conditions were rapidly changing, the old aristocracy was becoming perverted, Lutheranisms, Calvinism and Puritanism were breaking down the old communal sense of brotherhood so arduously built up during the Middle Ages, capitalism was ousting the trade and craft guilds of free labour and political absolutism was crushing ever lower and lower a proletariat that was fast losing the last vestiges of old liberty. The fact of slavery without the name was gradually imposed on the agricultural classes, and after the suppression of the monasteries in England work as work lost its sacred character and fell under contempt. With the outbreak of industrialism in the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the institution and introduction of “labour-saving” machinery and the consequent division of labour, the factory system, the joint-stock company and capitalism, this new slavery was extended to industrial workers, and with its establishment disappeared the element of joy in labour.

For fifty years, about the blackest half-century civilization has had to record, this condition of industrial slavery continued with little amendment. Very slowly, however, the workers themselves, championed by certain aristocrats like the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury against professional Liberals like Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone in England, began to loosen the shackles that bound them to infamous conditions, and after the abrogation of laws that made any association of workingmen a penal offense, the labour unions began to ameliorate certain of the servile conditions under which for two generations the workman had suffered. Since then the process of abolishing wage-slavery went slowly forward until at last the war came not only to threaten its destruction altogether but also to place the emancipated workers in a position where they could dictate terms and conditions to capital, to employers, to government and to the general public; while even now in many parts of Europe and America, besides Russia, overt attempts are being made to bring back the old slavery, only with the former bondsmen in supreme dictatorship, the former employers and the “bourgeoisie” in the new serfage.

The old slavery is gone, but the joy in work has not been restored; instead, those who have achieved triumphant emancipation turn from labour itself with the same distaste, yes, with greater aversion than that which obtained under the old regime. With every added liberty and exemption, with every shortening of hours and increase of pay, production per hour falls off and the quality of the output declines. What is the reason for this? Is it due to the viciousness of the worker, to his natural selfishness, greed and cruelty? I do not think so, but rather that the explanation is to be found in the fact that the industrial system of modernism has resulted in a condition where the joy has been altogether cut out of labour, and that until this state of things has been reversed and the sense of the holiness of work and the joy of working have been restored, it is useless to look for workable solutions of the labour problem. The fact of industrial slavery has been done away with but the sense of the servile condition that attaches to work has been retained, therefore the idea of the dignity and holiness of labour has not come back any more than the old joy and satisfaction. Failing this recovery, no reorganization of industrial relations, neither profit-sharing nor shop committees, neither nationalization nor state socialism, neither the abolition of capital, nor Soviets nor syndicalism nor the dictatorship of the proletariat will get us anywhere. It is all a waste of time, and, through its ultimate failure and disappointments, an intensification of an industrial disease.

Why is it that this is so? For an answer I must probe deep and, it may seem, cut wildly. I believe it is because we have built up a system that goes far outside the limits of human scale, transcends human capacity, is forbidden by the laws and conditions of life, and must be abrogated if it is not to destroy itself and civilization in the process.

What, precisely has taken place? Late in the eighteenth century two things happened; the discovery of the potential inherent in coal and its derivative, steam, with electricity yet unexploited but ready to hand, and the application of this to industrial purposes, together with the initiating of a long and astounding series of discoveries and inventions all applicable to industrial purposes. With a sort of vertiginous rapidity the whole industrial process was transformed from what it had been during the period of recorded history; steam and machinery took the place of brain and hand power directly applied, and a revolution greater than any other was effected.

The new devices were hailed as “labour-saving” but they vastly increased labour both in hours of work and in hands employed. Bulk production through the factory system was inevitable, the result being an enormous surplus over the normal and local demand. To organize and conduct these processes of bulk-production required money greater in amount than individuals could furnish; so grew up capitalism, the joint-stock company, credit and cosmopolitan finance. To produce profits and dividends markets must be found for the huge surplus product. This was accomplished by stimulating the covetousness of people for things they had not thought of, under normal conditions would not, in many cases, need, and very likely would be happier without, and in “dumping” on supposedly barbarous peoples in remote parts of the world, articles alien to their traditions and their mode of life and generally pestiferous in their influence and results. So came advertising in all its branches, direct and indirect, from the newspaper and the bill-board to the drummer, the diplomatic representative and the commercial missionary.

Every year saw some new invention that increased the product per man, the development of some new advertising device, the conquest of some new territory or the delimitation of some new “sphere of influence,” and the revelation of some new possibility in the covetousness of man. Profits rose to new heights and accumulating dividends clamoured for new opportunities for investment. Competition tended to cut down returns, therefore labour was more and more sustained through diminished wages and laws that savagely prevented any concerted effort towards self-defense. Improvements in agricultural processes and the application of machinery and steam power, together with bulk-production and scientific localization of crops, threw great quantities of farm-labourers out of work and drove them into the industrial towns, while advances in medical science and in sanitation raised the proportion of births to deaths and soon provided a surplus of potential labour so that the operation of the “law of supply and demand,” extolled by a new philosophy and enforced by the new “representative” or democratic and parliamentary government, resulted in an unfailing supply of cheap labour paid wages just beyond the limit of starvation.

At last there came evidences that the limit had been reached; the whole world had been opened up and pre-empted, labour was beginning to demand and even get more adequate wages, competition, once hailed as “the life of trade” was becoming so fierce that dividends were dwindling. Something had to be done and in self-defense industries began to coalesce in enormous “trusts” and “combines” and monopolies. Capitalization of millions now ran into billions, finance became international in its scope and gargantuan in its proportions and ominousness, advertising grew from its original simplicity and naïveté into a vast industry based on all that the most ingenious professors could tell of applied psychology, subsidizing artists, poets, men of letters, employing armies of men along a hundred different lines, expending millions annually in its operations, making the modern newspaper possible, and ultimately developing the whole system of propaganda which has now become the one great determining factor in the making of public opinion.

When the twentieth century opened, that industrialism which had begun just a century before, had, with its various collateral developments, financial, educational, journalistic, etc., become not only the greatest force in society, but as well a thing operating on the largest scale that man had ever essayed: beside it the Roman Empire was parochial.

The result of this institution, conceived on such imperial lines, was, in the field we are now considering, the total destruction of the sense of the holiness of labour and of joy in work. It extended far beyond the limits of pure industrialism; it moulded and controlled society in all its forms, destroying ideals old as history, reversing values, confusing issues and wrecking man’s powers of judgment. Until the war it seemed irresistible, now its weakness and the fallacy of its assumptions are revealed, but it has become so absolutely a part of our life, indeed of our nature, that we are unable to estimate it by any sound standards of judgment, and even when we approximate this we cannot think in other terms when we try to devise our schemes of redemption. Even the socialist and the Bolshevik think in imperial terms when they try to compass the ending of imperialism.

Under this supreme system, as I see it, the two essential things I have spoken of cannot be restored, nor could they maintain themselves if, by some miracle, they were once re-established. The indictment cannot be closed here. The actual condition that has developed from industrialism presents certain factors that are not consonant with sane, wholesome and Christian living. Not only has the unit of human scale in human society been done away with, not only have the sense of the nobility of work and joy in the doing been exterminated, but, as well, certain absolutely false principles and methods have been adopted which are not susceptible of reform but only of abolition.

Of some of these I have spoken already; the alarming drift towards cities, until now in the United States more than one-half the population is urban; the segregation of industries in certain cities and regions; the minute division of labour and intensive specialization; the abnormal growth of a true proletariat or non-land-holding class; the flooding of the country by cheap labour drawn from the most backward communities and from peoples of low race-value. Out of this has arisen a bitter class conflict and the ominous beginnings of a perilous class consciousness, with actual warfare joined in several countries, and threatened in all others where industrial civilization is prevalent. With this has grown up an artificially stimulated covetousness for a thousand futile luxuries, and a standard of living that presupposes a thousand non-essentials as basic necessities. Production for profit, not use, excess production due to machinery, efficient organization, and surplus of labour, together with the necessity for marketing the product at a profit, have produced a state of things where at least one-half the available labour in the country is engaged in the production and sale of articles which are not necessary to physical, intellectual or spiritual life, while of the remainder, hardly more than a half is employed in production, the others are devoting themselves to distribution and to the war of competition through advertising and the capturing of trade by ingenious and capable salesmen. It is a significant fact that two of the greatest industries in the United States are the making of automobiles and moving pictures.

It is probably true to say that of the potential labour in the United States, about one-fourth is producing those things which are physically, intellectually and spiritually necessary; the remaining three-fourths are essentially non-producers: they must, however, be housed, fed, clothed, and amused, and the cost of this support is added to the cost of the necessities of life. The reason for the present high cost of living lies possibly here.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me say here that under the head of necessities of life I do not mean a new model automobile each year, moving pictures, mechanical substitutes for music or any other art, and the thousand catch-trade devices that appear each year for the purpose of filching business from another or establishing a new desire in the already over-crowded imaginations of an over-stimulated populace. Particularly do I not mean advertising in any sense in which it is now understood and practised. If, as I believe to be the case, production for profit, rather than for use, the reversal of the ancient doctrine that the demand must produce the supply, in favour of the doctrine that the supply must foster the demand, is the foundation of our economic error and our industrial ills, then it follows that advertising as it is now carried on by billboards, circulars and newspapers, by drummers, solicitors and consular agents, falls in the same condemnation, for except by its offices the system could not have succeeded or continue to function. It is bad in itself as the support and strength of a bad institution, but its guilt does not stop here. So plausible is it, so essential to the very existence of the contemporary regime, so knit up with all the commonest affairs of life, so powerful in its organization and broad in its operations, it has poisoned, and continues to poison, the minds of men so that the headlong process of losing all sense of comparative values is accelerated, while every instinctive effort at recovery and readjustment is nullified. How far this process has gone may be illustrated by two instances. It is only a few months ago that a most respected clergyman publicly declared that missionaries were the greatest and most efficient asset to trade because they were unofficial commercial agents who opened up new and savage countries to Western commerce through advertising commodities of which the natives had never heard, and arousing in them a sense of acquisitiveness that meant more wealth and business for trade and manufacture, which should support foreign missions on this ground at least. More recently the head of an advertising concern in New York is reported to have said: “It is principally through advertising that we have arrived at the high degree of civilization which this age enjoys, for advertising has taught us the use of books and how to furnish our homes with the thousand and one comforts that add so materially to our physical and intellectual well-being. The future of the world depends on advertising. Advertising is the salvation of civilization, for civilization cannot outlive advertising a century.”

It is tempting to linger over such a delectable morsel as this, for even if it is only the absurd and irresponsible output of one poor, foolish man, it does express more or less what industrial civilization holds to be true, though few would avow their faith so whole-heartedly. The statement was made as propaganda, and propaganda is merely advertising in its most insidious and dangerous form. The thing revealed its possibilities during the war, but the black discredit that was then very justly attached to it could not prevail against its manifest potency, and it is now universally used after the most comprehensive and frequently unscrupulous fashion, with results that can only be perilous in the extreme. The type and calibre of mind that has now been released from long bondage, and by weight of numbers is now fast taking over the direction of affairs, is curiously subservient to the written word, and lacking a true sense of comparative values, without effective leadership either secular or religious, is easily swayed by every wind of doctrine. The forces of evil that are ever in conflict with the forces of right are notoriously ingenious in making the worse appear the better cause, and with every desire for illumination and for following the right way, the multitude, whether educated or illiterate, fall into the falsehoods of others’ imaginings. Money, efficiency, an acquired knowledge of mob psychology, the printing press and the mail service acting in alliance, and directed by fanatical or cynical energy, form a force of enormous potency that is now being used effectively throughout society. It is irresponsible, anonymous and pervasive. Through its operation the last barriers are broken down between the leadership of character and the leadership of craft, while all formal distinctions between the valuable and the valueless are swept away.

I have spoken at some length of this particular element in the present condition of things, because in both its aspects, as the support of our present industrial and economic system and as the efficient moulder of a fluid and unstable public opinion, it is perhaps the strongest and most subtle force of which we must take account.

With a system so prevalent as imperial industry, so knit up with every phase of life and thought, and so determining a factor in all our concepts, united as it is with two such invincible allies as advertising and propaganda, it is inconceivable that it should be overthrown by any human force from without. Holding it to be essentially wrong, it seems to me providential that it is already showing signs of falling by its own weight. Production of commodities has far exceeded production of the means of payment, and society is now running on promises to pay, on paper obligations, on anticipations of future production and sale, on credit, in a word. The war has enormously magnified this condition until an enforced liquidation would mean bankruptcy for all the nations of the earth, while the production of utilities is decreasing in proportion to the production of luxuries, labour is exacting increasing pay for decreasing hours of work and quality of output, and the enormous financial structure, elaborately and ingeniously built up through several generations, is in grave danger of immediate catastrophe. The whole world is in the position of an insolvent debtor who is so deeply involved that his creditors cannot afford to let him go into bankruptcy, and so keep him out of the Poor Debtor’s Court by doling out support from day to day. Confidence is the only thing that keeps matters going; what happens when this is lost is now being demonstrated in many parts of Europe. The optimist claims that increased production, coupled with enforced economy, will produce a satisfactory solution, but there is no evidence that labour, now having the whip-hand, will give up its present advantage sufficiently to make this possible; even if it did, payment must be in the form of exchange or else in further promises to pay, while the capacity of the world for consumption is limited somewhere, though thus far “big business” has failed to recognize this fact. At present the interest charges on debts, both public and private, have reached a point where they come near to consuming all possible profits even from a highly accelerated rate of production. Altogether it is reasonable to assume that the present financial-industrial system is near its term for reasons inherent in itself, let alone the possibility of a further extension of the drastic and completely effective measures of destruction that are characteristics of Bolshevism and its blood-brothers.

Assuming that this is so, two questions arise: what is to take the place of imperial industry, and how is this substitution to be brought about?

I think the answer to the first is: a social and industrial system based on small, self-contained, largely self-sufficing units, where supply follows demand, where production is primarily for use not profit, and where in all industrial operations some system will obtain which is more or less that of the guilds of the Middle Ages. I should like to go into this a little more in detail before trying to answer the second question.

The normal social unit is a group of families predominantly of the same race, territorially compact, of substantially the same ideals as expressed in religion and the philosophy of life, and sufficiently numerous to provide from within itself the major part of those things which are necessary to physical, intellectual and spiritual well-being. It should consist of a central nucleus of houses, each with its garden, the churches, schools and public buildings that are requisite, the manufactories and workshops that supply the needs of the community, the shops for sale of those things not produced at home, and all necessary places of amusement. Around this residential centre should be sufficient agricultural land to furnish all the farm products that will be consumed by the community itself. The nucleus of habitation and industry, together with the surrounding farms, make up the social unit, which is to the fullest possible degree, self-contained, self-sufficient and self-governing.

Certain propositions are fundamental, and they are as follows: Every family should own enough land to support itself at need. The farms included in the unit must produce enough to meet the needs of the population. Industry must be so organized that it will normally serve the resident population along every feasible line. Only such things as cannot be produced at home on account of climatic or soil limitations should be imported from outside. All necessary professional services should be obtainable within the community itself. All financial transactions such as loans, credits, banking and insurance should be domestic. Surplus products, whether agricultural, industrial or professional, should be considered as by-products, and in no case should the producing agency acquire such magnitude that home-consumption becomes a side issue and production for profit take the place of production for use.

All this is absolutely opposed to our present system, but our present system is wasteful, artificial, illogical, unsocial, and therefore vicious. I have said enough as to the falsities, the dangers and the failures of bulk-production through the operations of capitalism, the factory system and advertising, but its concomitant, the segregation of industries, is equally objectionable. To ship hogs 1,500 miles to be slaughtered and packed in food form, and then ship this manufactured product back to the source from which the raw material came; to feed a great city with grain, potatoes and fruits coming from 1,000 to 3,000 miles away, and vegetables from a distance of several hundred miles, while the farms within a radius of fifty miles are abandoned and barren; to make all the shoes for the nation in one small area, to spin the wool and cotton and weave the cloth in two or three others; to make the greater part of the furniture in one state, the automobiles in a second and the breakfast food in a third, is so preposterous a proposition that it belongs in Gulliver’s Travels, not in the annals of a supposedly intelligent people. The only benefit is that which for a time accrued to the railways, which carted raw materials and finished products back and forth over thousands of miles of their lines, the costs of shipment and reshipment being naturally added to the price to the consumer. The penalties for this uneconomic procedure were borne by society at large, not only in the increased costs but through the abnormal communities, each with its tens of thousands of operatives all engaged in the same work and generally drawn from foreign races (with the active co-operation of the steamship lines), and the permanent dislocation of the labour supply, together with the complete disruption of the social synthesis.

With production for profit and segregation of industries has come an almost infinitesimal division and specialization of labour. Under a right industrial system this would be reduced, not magnified. The dignity of labour and the joy of creation demand that in so far as possible each man should carry through one entire operation. This is of course now, and always has been under any highly developed civilization, impossible in practice, except along certain lines of art and craftsmanship. The evils of the existing system can in a measure be done away with the moment production for use is the recognized law, for it is only in bulk-production that this intensive specialization can be made to pay. Bulk-production there will always be until, and if, the world is reorganized on the basis of an infinite number of self-contained social units, but in the ideal community and I am dealing now with ideals it would not exist.

Allied with this is the whole question of the factory method and the use and misuse of machinery. It seems to me that the true principle is that machinery and the factory are admissible only when so employed they actually do produce, in bulk operations, a better product, and with less labour, than is possible through hand work. Weaving, forging and all work where human action must be more or less mechanical, offer a fair field for the machine and the factory, but wherever the human element can enter, where personality and the skilled craft of the hand are given play, the machine and the factory are inadmissible. The great city, creation of “big business,” segregation of industries, advertising, salesmanship and a hundred other concomitants of modernism, have built up an abnormal and avaricious demand for bulk-production along lines where the handicraft should function. It becomes necessary let us say to provide a million dollars worth of furniture for a ten million dollar hotel (itself to be superseded and scrapped in perhaps ten years) and naturally only the most intensive and efficient factory system can meet this demand. Rightly, however, the furniture of a community should be produced by the local cabinet makers, and so it should be in many other industries now entirely taken over by the factory system.

For the future then we must consciously work for the building upward from primary units, so completely reversing our present practice of creating the big thing and fighting hopelessly to preserve such small and few doles of liberty and personality as may be permitted to filter downward from above. This is the only true democracy, and the thing we call by the name is not this, largely because we have bent our best energies to the building up of vast and imperial aggregates which have inevitably assumed a complete unity in themselves and become dominating, tyrannical and ruthless forces that have operated regardless of the sound laws and wholesome principles of a right society. Neither the vital democracy of principle nor the artificial democracy of practice can exist in conjunction with imperialism, whether this is established in government, in industry, in trade, in society or in education.

If we can assume, then, the gradual development of a new society in which these principles will be carried out, a society that is made up of social units of human scale, self-contained, self-supporting and self-governed, where production is primarily for use not profit, and where bulk-production is practically non-existent, the sub-division of labour reduced to the lowest practicable point, machinery employed to a much less extent than now, and the factory system abolished, what organic form will labour take on in place of that which now obtains? It is possible to forecast this only in the most general terms, for life itself must operate to determine the lines of development and dictate the consequent forms. If we can acquire a better standard of comparative values, and with a clearer and more fearless vision estimate the rights and wrongs of the contemporary system, rejecting the ill thing and jealously preserving, or passionately regaining, the good, we shall be able to establish certain broad, fundamental and governing principles, and doing this we can await in confidence the evolution of the organic forms that will be the working agencies of the new society.

I have tried to indicate some of the basic principles of a new society. The operating forms, so far as industry is concerned, will, I think, follow in essential respects the craft-guilds of the Middle Ages. They will not be an archaeological restoration, as some of the English protagonists of this great revolution seem to anticipate, they will be variously adapted to the peculiar conditions of a new century, but the basic principles will be preserved. Whatever happens, I am sure it will not be either a continuation of the present system of capitalism and profit-hunting, or nationalization of industries, or state socialism in any form, or anything remotely resembling Bolshevism, syndicalism or a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Here, as in government, education and social relations, the power and the authority of the state must decline, government itself withdrawing more and more from interference with the operation of life, and liberty find its way back to the individual and to the social and economic groups. We live now under a more tyrannical and inquisitorial regime, in spite of (partly perhaps because of) its democratic forms and dogmas, than is common in historical records. Nationalization or state socialism would mean so great a magnifying of this condition that existence would soon become both grotesque and intolerable. We must realize, and soon, that man may lose even the last semblance of liberty, as well under a nominal democracy as under a nominal despotism or theocracy.

The guild system was the solution of the industrial problem offered and enforced by Christianity working through secular life; it presupposed the small social and industrial unit and becomes meaningless if conceived in the gigantic and comprehensive scale of modern institutions. “National guilds” is a contradiction in terms: it takes on the same element of error that inheres in the idea of “one big union.” In certain respects the Christian guild resembled the modern trade union, but it differed from it in more ways, and it seems to be true that wherever this difference exists the guild was right and the union is wrong. Community of fellowship and action amongst men of each craft trade or calling is essential under any social system, good or bad, and it would be inseparable from the better society that must sometime grow up on the basis of the unit of human scale, for these autonomous groups, in order to furnish substantially all that their component parts could require, would have to be of considerable size as compared with the little farming villages of New England, though in contrast with the great cities of modernism they would be small indeed. In these new “walled towns” there would be enough men engaged in agriculture, in the necessary industrial occupations, in trade and in the professions to form many guilds of workable size, and normally these guilds would neither contain members of two or more professions or occupations, nor those from outside the community itself. The guild cannot function under intensive methods of production or where production is primarily for profit, or where the factory system prevails, or where capitalism is the established system, or under combinations, trusts or other devices for the establishing and maintenance of great aggregates tending always towards monopoly. However much we may admire the guild system and desire its restoration, we may as well recognize this fact at once. The imperial scale must go and the human scale be restored before the guild can come back in any general sense.

I am assuming that this will happen, either through conscious action on the part of the people or as the result of catastrophe that always overtakes those who remain wedded to the illusions of falsity. On this assumption what are these enduring principles that will control the guild system of industry in the new State, however may be its form?

The answer is to be found in the old guilds, altars, shrines, vestments and sacred vessels were given in incredible quantities for the furnishing and embellishment of the chapel or church; funds also for the maintenance of priestly offices especially dedicated to the guild.

Closely allied with the religious spirit was that of good-fellowship and merrymaking. Every sort of feast and game and pageant was a part of the guild system, as it was indeed of life generally at this time when men did not have to depend upon hired professional purveyors of amusement for their edification. What they wanted they did themselves, and this community in worship and community in merrymaking did more even than the merging of common material interests, to knit the whole body together into a living organism.

In how far the old system can be revived and put into operation is a question. Certainly it cannot be adopted as a fad and imposed on an unwilling society as a clever archaeological restoration. It will have to grow naturally out of life itself and along lines at present hardly predicable. There are many evidences that just this spontaneous generation is taking place. The guild system is being preached widely in England where the defects of the present scheme are more obvious and the resulting labour situation or rather social situation is more fraught with danger than elsewhere, and already the restoration seems to have made considerable headway. I am convinced, however, that the vital aspects of the case are primarily due to the interior working of a new spirit born of disillusionment and the undying fire in man that flames always towards regeneration; what the ardent preaching of the enthusiastic protagonists of the crusade best accomplishes is the creation in the minds of those not directly associated with the movement of a readiness to give sympathy and support to the actual accomplishment when it manifests itself. Recently I have come in contact here in America with several cases where the workmen themselves have broken away from the old ways and have actually established what are to all intents and purposes craft-guilds, without in the least realizing that they were doing this.

I think the process is bound to continue, for the old order has broken down and is so thoroughly discredited it can hardly be restored. If time is granted us, great things must follow, but it is increasingly doubtful if this necessary element of time can be counted on. Daily the situation grows more menacing. Capital, which so long exploited labour to its own fabulous profit, is not disposed to sit quiet while the fruits of its labours and all prospects of future emoluments are being dissipated, and it is hard at work striving to effect a “return to normalcy.” In this it is being unconsciously aided by the bulk of union labour which, encouraged by the paramount position it achieved during the war, influenced by an avarice it may well have learned from its former masters, as narrow in its vision as they, and increasingly subservient to a leadership which is frequently cynical and unscrupulous and always of an order of character and intelligence which is tending to lower and lower levels, is alienating sympathy and bringing unionism into disrepute. In the United States the tendency is steadily towards a very dangerous reactionism, with a corresponding strengthening of the radical element which aims at revolution, and that impossible thing, a proletarian dictatorship. It is this latter which is rampant and at present unchecked in Europe, and this also is a constant menace to the success of those sane and righteous movements which take their lead from the guild system of the Middle Ages. A third danger, but one which is constantly on the decline at present, partly because of the general disrepute of governments and partly because of the enormous accessions of power now accruing both to reactionism and radical revolutionism, or “Bolshevism,” is state socialism or nationalization, which leaves untouched all the fatal elements in industrialism while it changes only the agents of administration. The complete collapse of able and constructive and righteous leadership, which is one of the startling phenomena of modernism, has left uncontrolled the enormous energy that has been released during the last three generations, and this is working blindly but effectively towards a cataclysm so precipitate and comprehensive that it is impossible not to fear that it may determine long before the sober and informed elements in society have accomplished very much in the recovery and establishment of sound and righteous principles and methods.

Of course we can compass whichever result we will. We may shut our eyes to the omens and let matters drift to disaster, or we may take thought and council and avert the penalty that threatens us; the event is in our own hands. It is as criminal to foresee and predict only catastrophe as it is to compass this through lethargy, selfishness and illusion. We are bound to believe that righteousness will prevail, even in our own time, and believing this, what, in general terms will be the construction of the new system that must take the place of industrialism?

I have already indicated what seem to me the fundamental ideas as: the small social unit that is self-sustaining; production primarily for use, cooeperation in place of competition; a revived guild system with the abolition of capitalism, exploitation and intensive specialization as we now know these dominant factors in modern civilization. In the application of these principles there are certain innovations that will, I think, take place, and these may be listed somewhat as follows:

Land holding will become universal and the true proletariat or landless class will disappear. It may be that the holding of land will become a prerequisite to active citizenship. Industrial production being for use not profit, the great city becomes a thing of the past, and life is rendered simpler through the elimination of a thousand useless and vicious luxuries; those employed in mechanical industries will be incalculably fewer than now, while those that remain will give only a portion of their time to industrial production, the remainder being available for productive work on their own gardens and farms. The handicrafts will be restored to their proper place and dignity, taking over into creative labour large numbers of those who otherwise would be sacrificed to the factory system. Where bulk production, as in weaving and the preparation and manufacturing of metals, is economical and unavoidable and carried on by factory methods, these manufactories will probably be taken over by the several communities (not by the state as a whole) and administered as public institutions for the benefit of the community and under conditions and regulations which ensure justice and well-being to the employees. All those in any community engaged in a given occupation, as for example, building, will form one guild made up of masters, journeymen and apprentices, with the same principles and much the same methods as prevailed under the ancient guild system. Fluctuating scales of prices determined by fluctuating conditions of competition, supply and demand, and power of coercion, will give place to “the fair price” fixed by concerted community action and revised from time to time in order to preserve a right balance with the general scale of cost of raw materials and cost of living. A maximum of returns in the shape of profits or dividends will be fixed by law. The community itself will undertake the furnishing of credits, loans and necessary capital for the establishing of a new business, charging a small rate of interest and maintaining a reserve fund to meet these operations. Private banking, insurance and the loaning of money on collateral will cease to exist.

I dare say this will all sound chimerical and irrational in the extreme; I do not see it in that light. Its avowed object is the supersession of “big business” in all its phases by something that comes down to human scale. It aims to reduce labour and divide it more evenly by making the great mass of non-producers those engaged in distribution, salesmanship, advertising, propaganda, and the furnishing of things unnecessary to the bodily, intellectual and spiritual needs of man actual producers and self-supporting to a very large extent. It aims at restoring to work some sense of the joy in creation through active mind and hand. It aims at the elimination of the parasitic element in society and of that dangerous factor which subsists on wealth it acquires without earning, and by sheer force of its own opulence dominates and degrades society. It does not strike at private ownership, but rather exalts, extends and defends this, but it does cut into all the theories and practices of communism and socialism by establishing the principle and practice of fellowship and cooeperation. Is this “chimerical and irrational”?

Meanwhile the “walled towns” do not exist and may not for generations. “Big business” is indisposed to abrogate itself. Trade unionism is fighting for its life and thereafter for world conquest, while the enmity between capital and labour increases, with no evidence that a restored guild system is even approximately ready to take its place. Strikes and lockouts grow more and more numerous, and wider and more menacing in their scope. The day of the “general strike” has only been delayed at the eleventh hour in several countries, and a general strike, if it can hold for a sufficient period, means, where-ever it occurs and whenever it succeeds, the end of civilization and the loosing of the floods of anarchy. There is hardly time for us patiently to await the slow process of individual and corporate enlightenment or the spontaneous development of the autonomous communities which, if they were sufficient in number, would solve the problem through eliminating the danger. What then, in the premises, can we do?

There are of course certain concrete things which might help, as for instance the further extension and honest trying out of the “Kansas plan” for regulating industrial relations; the forming of “consumers leagues,” and all possible support and furtherance of cooeperative efforts of every sort. There are further possibilities (perhaps hardly probabilities) of controlling stock issues and stock holdings so that dividends do not have to be paid on grossly inflated capitalization, and fixing the maximum of dividends payable to non-active stockholders. Equally desirable but equally improbable, is the raising of the level of leadership in the labour unions so that these valuable institutions may no longer stultify themselves and wreck their own cause by their unjust and anti-social regulations as to apprentices, control of maximum output and its standard of quality, division of labour with ironclad inhibitions against one man doing another’s work and against one man doing what six men can do less well, and as to the obligation to strike on order when no local or personal grievance exists. Most useful of all would be a voluntary renunciation, on the part of the purchasing public, of nine-tenths of the futile luxuries they now insanely demand, coupled with the production by themselves of some of the commodities which are easily producable; in other words, establishing some measure of self-support and so releasing many men and women from the curse of existence under factory conditions and giving them an opportunity of living a normal life under self-supporting circumstances. This, coupled with a fostering of the “back to the farm” movement, and the development of conditions which would make this process more practicable and the life more attractive, would do much, though in small ways, towards producing a more wholesome and less threatening state of affairs.

Back of the whole problem, however, lies a fallacy in our conception of existence that must be eliminated before even the most constructive panaceas can possibly work. I mean the whole doctrine of natural rights which has become the citadel of capitalism in all its most offensive aspects, and of labour in its most insolent assumptions. The “rights” of property, the “right” to strike, the “right” to collective bargaining, the “right” to shut down an essential industry or to “walk out” and then picket the place so that it may not be reopened, the “right” to vote and hold office and do any fool thing you please so long as it is within the law, these are applications of what I mean when I speak of a gross fallacy that has come into being and has stultified our intelligence while bringing near the wrecking of our whole system.

Neither man nor his community possesses any absolute rights; they are all conditioned on how they are exercised. If they are not so conditioned they become privilege, which is a right not subject to conditions, and privilege is one of the things republicanism and democracy and every other effort towards human emancipation have set themselves up to destroy. Even the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is conditioned by the manner of use, and the same is true of every other and unspecified right. I do not propose to speak here of more than one aspect of this self-evident truth, but the single instance I cite is one that bears closely on the question of our industrial and economic situation; it is the responsibility to society of property or capital on the one hand and of labour on the other, when both invoke their “rights” to justify them in oppressing the general public in the pursuit of their own natural interests.

During the Middle Ages, just as the political theory maintained that while a king ruled by divine right, this right gave him no authority to govern wrong, so the social theory held that while a man had a right to private property he had no right to use it against society, nor could the labourer use his own rights to the injury of the same institution. Power, property and labour must be used as a function, i.e., “an activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose.” Unless I am mistaken, this is at the basis of our “common law.”

As Mediaevalism gave place to the Renaissance this Christian idea was abandoned, and increasingly the obligation was severed from the right, which so became that odious thing, privilege. Intolerable in its injustice and oppression, this privilege, which by the middle of the eighteenth century had become the attribute of the aristocracy, was completely overthrown, in France first of all, and a new doctrine of rights was enunciated and put in operation. Unfortunately the result was in essence simply a transforming of privilege from one body to another, for the old conception of social purpose, as the necessary concomitant of acknowledged rights, did not emerge from the shadows of the Middle Ages; it had been too long forgotten. The new “rights” were exclusively individualistic, in practice, though in the minds of the idealists who formulated them, they had their social aspect. Their promulgation synchronized with the sudden rise and violent expansion of industrialism, and as one country after another followed the lead of England in accepting the new system, they hardened into an iron-clad scheme for the defence of property and the free action of the holders and manipulators of property. Backed by the economic philosophy of Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham and the Manchester School, generally, and the evolutionary theories of the exponents of Darwinism, and abetted by an endless series of statutes, the idea of the exemption of property holders from any responsibility to society for the use of their property, became a fixed part of the mental equipment of modernism. Precisely the same thing happened politically and socially. Rights were personal and implied no necessary obligation to society as a whole; they were personal attributes and as such to be defended at all costs.

Now the result of this profound error as to the existence, nature and limitation of these personal rights has meant simply the destruction of a righteous and unified society which works by cooeperation and fellowship, and the substitution of individuals and corporate bodies who work by competition, strife and mutual aggression towards the attainment of all they can get under the impulse of what was once praised as “enlightened self interest.” In other words war. The conflict that began in 1914 was not a war hurled into the midst of a white peace, it was only a military war arising in the centre of a far greater social war, for there is no other word that is descriptive. Rights that are not contingent on the due discharge of duties and obligations are but hateful privilege; privilege has issue in selfishness and egotism, which in turn work themselves out in warfare and in the hatred that both precedes and follows conflict.

The net result of a century and a half of industrialism is avarice, warfare and hate. Society can continue even when avariciousness is rampant for a time and warfare of one sort or another seems inseparable from humanity, at all events it has always been so, but hatred is another matter, for it is the negation of social life and is its solvent. Anger passes; it is sometimes even righteous, but hatred is synonymous with death in that it dissolves every unit, reducing it to its component parts and subjecting each of these to dissolution in its turn. Righteous anger roused the nations into the war that hate had engendered, but hate has followed after and for the moment is victorious. Russia seethes with hatred and is perishing of its poison, while there is not another country in Europe, of those that were involved in the war, where the same is not true in varying degrees; hatred of race for race, of nation for nation, of class for class, of one social or industrial or economic or political institution for another. This, above all else, is the disintegrating influence, and against it no social organism, no civilization can stand. Unless it is abrogated it means an ending of another epoch of human life, a period of darkness and another beginning, some time after the poison has been worked out by misery, adversity and forced repentance.

It is this prevalence of hatred, reinforced by avarice and perpetuated by incessant warfare, that negatives all the efforts that are made towards effecting a correspondence between the divided interests that are the concomitant of industrialism. Strikes and lockouts, trades unions and employers’ associations as they are now constituted and as they now operate, syndicalism and Bolshevism and proletarian dictatorships, protective tariffs and commercial spheres of influence, propaganda and subsidized newspapers are all energized by the principle of hate, and no good thing can come of any of them. Nor is it enough to work for the re-establishment of justice even by those methods of righteousness, and with the impulse towards righteousness, which are so different from those which are functioning at present along the lines of contemporary industrial “reform.” Justice is a “natural” virtue with a real place in society, but the only saving force today is a supernatural virtue. This, amongst other things, Christ brought into the world and left as the saving force amongst the race He had redeemed and in the society reconstituted in accordance with His will. This supernatural virtue is Charity, sometimes expressed in the simpler form of Love, the essence of the social code of Christianity and the symbol of the New Dispensation as justice was the symbol of the Old. Just in so far as a man or a cult or an interest or a corporation or a state or a generation or a race, relinquishes charity as its controlling spirit, in so far it relinquishes its place in Christian society and its claim to the Christian name, while it is voided of all power for good or possibility of continuance. Where charity is gone, intellectual capacity, effectual power, and even justice itself become, not energies of good, but potent contributions to evil. Is this supernatural gift of charity a mark of contemporary civilization? Does it manifest itself with power today in the dealings between class and class, between interest and interest, between nation and nation? If not, then we have forfeited the name of Christian and betrayed Christian civilization into the hands of its enemies, while our efforts towards saving what is left to us of a once consistent and righteous society will be without result except as an acceleration of the now headlong process of dissolution.

I am not charging any class or any interest or any people with exclusive apostacy. In the end there is little to choose between one or another. Labour is not more culpable than capital, nor the proletarian than the industrial magnate and the financier, nor the nominal secularist than the nominal religionist. Nor am I charging conscious and willful acceptance of wrong in the place of right. It is the institution itself, industrialism as it has come to be, with all its concomitants and derivatives, that has betrayed man to his disgrace and his society to condemnation, and so long as this system endures so long will recovery be impossible and regeneration a vain thing vainly imagined. Charity, that is to say, fellowship, generosity, pity, self-sacrifice, chivalry, all that is comprehended in the thing that Christ was, and preached, and promulgated as the fundamental law of life, cannot come back to the world so long as avarice, warfare and hate continue to exist, and through Charity alone can we find the solution of the industrial and economic problem that must be solved under penalty of social death.