the benefit of the community and under conditions and regulations which ensure justice and well-being to the employees.  All those in any community engaged in a given occupation, as for example, building, will form one guild made up of masters, journeymen and apprentices, with the same principles and much the same methods as prevailed under the ancient guild system.  Fluctuating scales of prices determined by fluctuating conditions of competition, supply and demand, and power of coercion, will give place to “the fair price” fixed by concerted community action and revised from time to time in order to preserve a right balance with the general scale of cost of raw materials and cost of living.  A maximum of returns in the shape of profits or dividends will be fixed by law.  The community itself will undertake the furnishing of credits, loans and necessary capital for the establishing of a new business, charging a small rate of interest and maintaining a reserve fund to meet these operations.  Private banking, insurance and the loaning of money on collateral will cease to exist.

I dare say this will all sound chimerical and irrational in the extreme; I do not see it in that light.  Its avowed object is the supersession of “big business” in all its phases by something that comes down to human scale.  It aims to reduce labour and divide it more evenly by making the great mass of non-producers—­those engaged in distribution, salesmanship, advertising, propaganda, and the furnishing of things unnecessary to the bodily, intellectual and spiritual needs of man—­actual producers and self-supporting to a very large extent.  It aims at restoring to work some sense of the joy in creation through active mind and hand.  It aims at the elimination of the parasitic element in society and of that dangerous factor which subsists on wealth it acquires without earning, and by sheer force of its own opulence dominates and degrades society.  It does not strike at private ownership, but rather exalts, extends and defends this, but it does cut into all the theories and practices of communism and socialism by establishing the principle and practice of fellowship and cooeperation.  Is this “chimerical and irrational”?

Meanwhile the “walled towns” do not exist and may not for generations.  “Big business” is indisposed to abrogate itself.  Trade unionism is fighting for its life and thereafter for world conquest, while the enmity between capital and labour increases, with no evidence that a restored guild system is even approximately ready to take its place.  Strikes and lockouts grow more and more numerous, and wider and more menacing in their scope.  The day of the “general strike” has only been delayed at the eleventh hour in several countries, and a general strike, if it can hold for a sufficient period, means, where-ever it occurs and whenever it succeeds, the end of civilization and the loosing of the floods of anarchy.  There is hardly time for us patiently to await the slow process of individual and corporate enlightenment or the spontaneous development of the autonomous communities which, if they were sufficient in number, would solve the problem through eliminating the danger.  What then, in the premises, can we do?