In the latter case a great enterprise, forced to consider its “hands” as being also in their degree “heads,” would include a department of technical and business instruction for its own people.  From such ideas one passes very readily to the conception of guild-managed businesses in which the factor of capital would no longer stand out as an element distinct from and contrasted with the proprietorship of the workers.  One sees the worker as an active and intelligent helper during the great portion of his participation, and as an annuitant and perhaps, if he has devised economies and improvements, a receiver of royalties during his declining years.

And concurrently with the systematic reconstruction of a large portion of our industries upon these lines there will have to be a vigorous development of the attempts that are already being made, in garden cities, garden suburbs, and the like, to re-house the mass of our population in a more civilised and more agreeable manner.  Probably that is not going to pay from the point of view of the money-making business man, but we prosperous people have to understand that there are things more important and more profitable than money-making, and we have to tax ourselves not merely in money, but in time, care, and effort in the matter.  Half the money that goes out of England to Switzerland and the Riviera ought to go to the extremely amusing business of clearing up ugly corners and building jolly and convenient workmen’s cottages—­even if we do it at a loss.  It is part of our discharge for the leisure and advantages the system has given us, part of that just give and take, over and above the solicitor’s and bargain-hunter’s and money-lender’s conception of justice, upon which social order ultimately rests.  We have to do it not in a mood of patronage, but in a mood of attentive solicitude.  If not on high grounds, then on low grounds our class has to set to work and make those other classes more interested and comfortable and contented.  It is what we are for.  It is quite impossible for workmen and poor people generally to plan estates and arrange their own homes; they are entirely at the mercy of the wealthy in this matter.  There is not a slum, not a hovel, not an eyesore upon the English landscape for which some well-off owner is not ultimately to be blamed or excused, and the less we leave of such things about the better for us in that day of reckoning between class and class which now draws so near.

It is as plain now as the way from Calais to Paris that if the owning class does not attend to these amenities the mass of the people, doing its best to manage the thing through the politicians, presently will.  They may make a frightful mess of it, but that will never bring back things again into the hands that hold them and neglect them.  Their time will have passed for ever.