nly from human beings, with the initiative and caprices of
human beings. It will get it, in short, in so far as it treats
industry as a responsible profession.

The collective responsibility of the workers for the maintenance of the
standards of their profession is, then, the alternative to the
discipline which Capitalism exercised in the past, and which is now
breaking down. It involves a fundamental change in the position both
of employers and of trade unions. As long as the direction of industry
is in the hands of property-owners or their agents, who are concerned
to extract from it the maximum profit for themselves, a trade union is
necessarily a defensive organization. Absorbed, on the one hand, in
the struggle to resist the downward thrust of Capitalism upon the
workers' standard of life, and denounced, on the other, if it presumes,
to "interfere with management," even when management is most obviously
inefficient, it is an opposition which never becomes a government and
which has neither the will nor the power to assume responsibility for
the quality of the service offered to the consumer. If the abolition
of functionless property transferred the control of production to
bodies representing those who perform constructive work and those who
consume the goods produced, the relation of the worker to the public
would no longer be indirect but immediate, and associations which are
now purely defensive would be in a position not merely to criticize and
oppose but to advise, to initiate and to enforce upon their own members
the obligations of the craft.

{155}

It is obvious that in such circumstances the service offered the
consumer, however carefully safeguarded by his representation on the
authorities controlling each industry, would depend primarily upon the
success of professional organizations in finding a substitute for the
discipline exercised to-day by the agents of property-owners. It would
be necessary for them to maintain by their own action the zeal,
efficiency and professional pride which, when the barbarous weapons of
the nineteenth century have been discarded, would be the only guarantee
of a high level of production. Nor, once this new function has been
made possible for professional organizations, is there any extravagance
in expecting them to perform it with reasonable competence. How far
economic motives are balked to-day and could be strengthened by a
different type of industrial organiza