The guild system was the solution of the industrial problem offered and enforced by Christianity working through secular life; it presupposed the small social and industrial unit and becomes meaningless if conceived in the gigantic and comprehensive scale of modern institutions.  “National guilds” is a contradiction in terms:  it takes on the same element of error that inheres in the idea of “one big union.”  In certain respects the Christian guild resembled the modern trade union, but it differed from it in more ways, and it seems to be true that wherever this difference exists the guild was right and the union is wrong.  Community of fellowship and action amongst men of each craft trade or calling is essential 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 together into a living organism.