Meanwhile the Enquiry into the Control of Industry was developing on wider lines.  The Research Department set up its own office and staff, and began to collect information about all the methods of control of industry at present existing as alternatives to the normal capitalist system.  Co-operation in all its forms, the resistances of Trade Unionism, the effects of professional organisations, such as those of the Teachers and of the Engineers, and all varieties of State and Municipal enterprise were investigated in turn; several reports have been published as “New Statesman” Supplements, and a volume or series of volumes will in due time appear.

The problem of the Control of Industry had become important because of the rise of a new school of thought amongst Socialists, especially in France, where the rapid growth of Trade Unionism since 1884, combined with profound distrust of the group system of party politics, had led to a revival of old-fashioned anarchism in a new form.  Syndicalism, which is the French word for Trade Unionism, proposes that the future State should be organised on the basis of Trade Unions; it regards a man’s occupation as more vitally important to him than his place of residence, and therefore advocates representation by trades in place of localities:  it lays stress on his desire, his right, to control his own working life directly through his own elected representatives of his trade:  it criticises the “servile state” proposed by collectivists, wherein the workman, it is said, would be a wage-slave to officials of the State, as he is now to officials of the capitalists.  Thus it proposes that the control of industry should be in the hands of the producers, and not, as at present, in the hands of consumers through capitalists catering for their custom, or through co-operative societies of consumers, or through the State acting on behalf of citizens who are consumers.

A quite extraordinary diversity of streams of opinion converged to give volume to this new trend of thought.  There was the literary criticism of Mr. Hilaire Belloc, whose ideal is the peasant proprietor of France, freed from governmental control, a self-sufficient producer of all his requirements.  His attack was directed against the Servile State, supposed to be foreshadowed by the Minority Report, which proposed drastic collective control over the derelicts of our present social anarchy.  Then Mr. Tom Mann came back from Australia as the prophet of the new proletarian gospel, and for a few months attracted working-class attention by his energy and eloquence.  The South Wales miners, after many years of acquiescence in the rule of successful and highly respected but somewhat old-fashioned leaders, were awakening to a sense of power, and demanding from their Unions a more aggressive policy.  The parliamentary Labour Party since 1910 had resolved to support the Liberal Government in its contest with the House of Lords and in its demand for Irish Home