If we can assume, then, the gradual development of a new society in which these principles will be carried out, a society that is made up of social units of human scale, self-contained, self-supporting and self-governed, where production is primarily for use not profit, and where bulk-production is practically non-existent, the sub-division of labour reduced to the lowest practicable point, machinery employed to a much less extent than now, and the factory system abolished, what organic form will labour take on in place of that which now obtains?  It is possible to forecast this only in the most general terms, for life itself must operate to determine the lines of development and dictate the consequent forms.  If we can acquire a better standard of comparative values, and with a clearer and more fearless vision estimate the rights and wrongs of the contemporary system, rejecting the ill thing and jealously preserving, or passionately regaining, the good, we shall be able to establish certain broad, fundamental and governing principles, and doing this we can await in confidence the evolution of the organic forms that will be the working agencies of the new society.

I have tried to indicate some of the basic principles of a new society.  The operating forms, so far as industry is concerned, will, I think, follow in essential respects the craft-guilds of the Middle Ages.  They will not be an archaeological restoration, as some of the English protagonists of this great revolution seem to anticipate, they will be variously adapted to the peculiar conditions of a new century, but the basic principles will be preserved.  Whatever happens, I am sure it will not be either a continuation of the present system of capitalism and profit-hunting, or nationalization of industries, or state socialism in any form, or anything remotely resembling Bolshevism, syndicalism or a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  Here, as in government, education and social relations, the power and the authority of the state must decline, government itself withdrawing more and more from interference with the operation of life, and liberty find its way back to the individual and to the social and economic groups.  We live now under a more tyrannical and inquisitorial regime, in spite of (partly perhaps because of) its democratic forms and dogmas, than is common in historical records.  Nationalization or state socialism would mean so great a magnifying of this condition that existence would soon become both grotesque and intolerable.  We must realize, and soon, that man may lose even the last semblance of liberty, as well under a nominal democracy as under a nominal despotism or theocracy.