the brawny leg of the burly fighting-man.  However that may be, there can be no doubt that now the prizes of fortune often go to those who cannot be trusted to make good use of them or even to enjoy them, that Mr Wells’s great satire on our financial upstarts—­“Tono-Bungay”—­has plenty of truth in it, and that our present system, by its shocking waste of millions of good brains that never get a chance of development, is an economic blunder as well as an injustice that calls for remedy.

This being so, it is the business of all who want to see things made better to examine with most respectful attention any schemes that are put forward for the reconstruction of society, however strongly we may feel that real improvement is only to be got, not by reconstructing society but by improving the bodily and mental health and efficiency of its members.  The advocates of Socialism have had a patient and interested hearing for many decades, except among those to whom anything new is necessarily anathema.  There was something attractive in the notion that if all men worked for the good of the community and not for their own individual profit, the work 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whether the general standard of work might not deteriorate instead of improve if the stimulus of individual gain were withdrawn; and that the net result might probably be a diminished output consumed by a discontented people, less happy under a possibly stupid and short-sighted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