us degrees of competition and
co-operation, to win their living by providing the community with some
service which it requires. Organize it as you will, let it be a group
of craftsmen laboring with hammer and chisel, or peasants plowing their
own fields, or armies of mechanics of a hundred different trades
constructing ships which are miracles of complexity with machines which
are the climax of centuries of invention, its function is service, its
method is association. Because its function is service, an industry as
a whole has rights and duties towards the community, the abrogation of
which involves privilege. Because its method is association, the
different parties within it have rights and duties towards each other;
and the neglect or perversion of these involves oppression.

The conditions of a right organization of industry are, therefore,
permanent, unchanging, and capable of being apprehended by the most
elementary intelligence, provided it will read the nature of its
countrymen in the large outlines of history, not in the bloodless {7}
abstractions of experts. The first is that it should be subordinated
to the community in such a way as to render the best service
technically possible, that those who render no service should not be
paid at all, because it is of the essence of a function that it should
find its meaning in the satisfaction, not of itself, but of the end
which it serves. The second is that its direction and government
should be in the hands of persons who are responsible to those who are
directed and governed, because it is the condition of economic freedom
that men should not be ruled by an authority which they cannot control.
The industrial problem, in fact, is a problem of right, not merely of
material misery, and because it is a problem of right it is most acute
among those sections of the working classes whose material misery is
least. It is a question, first of Function, and secondly of Freedom.

{8}

II

RIGHTS AND FUNCTIONS

A function may be defined as an activity which embodies and expresses
the idea of social purpose. The essence of it is that the agent does
not perform it merely for personal gain or to gratify himself, but
recognizes that he is responsible for its discharge to some higher
authority. The purpose of industry is obvious. It is to supply man
with things which are necessary, useful or beautiful, and thus to bring
life to body or spirit. In so far as it i