I am very glad that it is so, for organising production is a very difficult and complicated and risky business, and from all the risks of it the wage-earner is saved.  The salary-earner or the professional, when once his product is turned out and paid for, also surrenders all claim upon the product.  What else could any reasonable wage-earner or professional expect or desire?  The brickmaker or the doctor cannot, after being paid for making bricks or mending a broken leg, expect still to have the bricks or the leg for his very own.  And how much use would they be to him if he could?  Unless he were to be allowed to sell them again to somebody else, which, after being once paid for them, would merely be absurd.

But when we come to the remedies that Mr. Cole suggests for these “marks of degraded status,” we find in the forefront of them that the worker must be secured “payment as a human being, and not merely as a mortal tenement of so much labour power for which an efficient demand exists.”  This, especially to an incurably lazy person like myself, is an extremely attractive programme.  To be paid, and paid well, merely in return for having “taken the trouble to be born,” is an ideal towards which my happiest dreams have ever struggled in vain.  But would it work as a practical scheme?  Speaking for myself, I can guarantee that under such circumstances I should potter about with many activities that would amuse my delicious leisure, but I doubt whether any of them would be regarded by society as a fit return for the pleasant livelihood that it gave me.  And human society can only be supplied with the things that it needs if its members turn out, not what it amuses them to make or produce, but what other people want.  And It is here that the National Guildsmen’s idea of freedom seems, in my humble judgment, to be entirely unsocial As things are, nobody can make money unless he produces what somebody wants and will pay for.  Even the capitalist, if he puts his capital into producing an article for which there is no demand, will get no return on it.  In other words, we can only earn economic freedom by doing something that our fellows want us to do, and so co-operating in the work of supplying man’s need. (That many of man’s needs are stupid and vulgar is most true, but the only way to cure that is to teach him to want something better.) The Guildsmen seem to think that this necessity to make or do something that is wanted implies slavery, and ought to be abolished.  They are fond of quoting Rousseau’s remark that “man is born free and is everywhere in chains.”  But is man born free to work as and on what he likes?  In a state of Nature man is born—­in most climates—­under the sternest necessity to work hard to catch or grow his food, to make himself clothes and build himself shelter.  And If he ignores this necessity the penalty is death.  The notion that man is born with a “right to live” is totally belied by the facts of natural existence.  It is encouraged by humanitarian sentiment which, rightly makes society responsible for the subsistence of all those born under its wing; but it is not part of the scheme of the universe.