of the world might
be done much better, because all the waste of competition and
advertisement would be cut out, machinery would be given its full
chance because it would be making work easier instead of causing
unemployment, and a greater output, more evenly distributed, would
enable the nation to breed a race, each generation of which would
come nearer to perfection. So splendid if true; but one always felt
misgivings as to whether the general standard of work might not
deteriorate instead of improve if the stimulus of individual gain were
withdrawn; and that the net result might probably be a diminished
output consumed by a discontented people, less happy under a possibly
stupid and short-sighted bureaucracy, than it is now when the chances
of life at least give it the glorious uncertainty of cricket. Since
the war our experiences of official control, even when working on
a nation trained in individual initiative, have increased those
misgivings manifold; and hundreds of people who were Socialistically
inclined in 1914 will now say that any system which handed over the
regulation of production and distribution to the State could end only
in disaster, unless we could first build up a new machinery of State
and a new people for it to work on.

Partly, perhaps, owing to this discredit into which the doctrines of
State Socialism have lately fallen, increasing attention has been
given to a body of theory that was already active before the war and
advocates a system of what it calls Guild Socialism, under which
industry is to be worked by National Guilds, embracing all the
workers, both by brain and by hand, in the various kinds of
production. Its advocates are, as far as I have been able to study
their pronouncements, decidedly hostile to State Socialism and
needlessly rode to some of its most prominent preachers, such as Mr
and Mrs Webb, who at least merit the respect due to those who have
given lives of work to supporting a cause which they believe to be
sound and in the best interests of mankind. But in spite of their
chronic and sometimes ill-mannered facetiousness at the expense of
State Socialism and its advocates, the Guild Socialists, as we shall
see, have to rely on State control for very important wheels in
their machinery and leave gaps in it which, as far as disinterested
observers can see, can only be filled by still further help from the
discredited State. It is no disparagement of the efforts of these
wr