hat history repeats itself, and it is
even more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man on
earth is kept so ignorant of the Middle Ages as the British workman,
except perhaps the British business man who employs him. Yet all who
know even a little of the Middle Ages can see that the modern Trade
Union is a groping for the ancient Guild. It is true that those who
look to the Trade Union, and even those clear-sighted enough to call it
the Guild, are often without the faintest tinge of mediaeval mysticism,
or even of mediaeval morality. But this fact is itself the most striking
and even staggering tribute to mediaeval morality. It has all the
clinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers of the most hard-headed
atheists had evolved, out of their own inner consciousness, the notion
that a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in
celibate groups for the good of the poor, or the observation of certain
hours and offices, it would be a very strong point in favour of the
monasteries. It would be all the stronger if the atheists had never
heard of monasteries; it would be strongest of all if they hated the
very name of monasteries. And it is all the stronger because the man who
puts his trust in Trades Unions does not call himself a Catholic or even
a Christian, if he does call himself a Guild Socialist.

The Trade Union movement passed through many perils, including a
ludicrous attempt of certain lawyers to condemn as a criminal conspiracy
that Trade Union solidarity, of which their own profession is the
strongest and most startling example in the world. The struggle
culminated in gigantic strikes which split the country in every
direction in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But another
process, with much more power at its back, was also in operation. The
principle represented by the New Poor Law proceeded on its course, and
in one important respect altered its course, though it can hardly be
said to have altered its object. It can most correctly be stated by
saying that the employers themselves, who already organized business,
began to organize social reform. It was more picturesquely expressed by
a cynical aristocrat in Parliament who said, "We are all Socialists
now." The Socialists, a body of completely sincere men led by several
conspicuously brilliant men, had long hammered into men's heads the
hopeless sterility of mere non-interference in exchange. The Socialists
proposed t