ntial 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 to