were starved on that plane.  Even psychical research, with which Pease and Podmore varied their Fabian activities, tended fatally towards the exposure of alleged psychical phenomena as physical tricks.  The work that came to our hands in our first two decades was materialistic work; and it was not until the turn of the century brought us the Suffrage movement and the Wells raid, that the materialistic atmosphere gave way, and the Society began to retain recruits of a kind that it always lost in the earlier years as it lost Mrs. Besant and (virtually) William Clarke.  It is certainly perceptibly less hard-headed than it was in its first period.

B

ON GUILD SOCIALISM

Here I venture to say, with some confidence, that Mr. Barker is mistaken.  That storm has burst on the Fabian Society and has left it just where it was.  Guild Socialism, championed by the ablest and most industrious insurgents of the rising generation in the Society, raised its issue with Collectivism only to discover, when the matter, after a long agitation, was finally thrashed out at a conference at Barrow House, that the issue was an imaginary one, and that Collectivism lost nothing by the fullest tenable concessions to the Guild Socialists.  A very brief consideration will shew that this was inevitable.

Guild Socialism, in spite of its engaging medieval name, means nothing more picturesque than a claim that under Socialism each industry shall be controlled by its own operators, as the professions are to-day.  This by itself would not imply Socialism at all:  it would be merely a revival of the medieval guild, or a fresh attempt at the now exploded self-governing workshop of the primitive co-operators.  Guild Socialism, with the emphasis on the Socialism, implies that the industries, however completely they may be controlled by their separate staffs, must pool their products.  All the Guild Socialists admit this.  The Socialist State must therefore include an organ for receiving and distributing the pooled products; and such an organ, representing the citizen not as producer but as consumer, reintroduces the whole machinery of Collectivism.  Thus the alleged antithesis between Guild Socialism and Collectivism, under cover of which the one was presented as an alternative to the other, vanished at the first touch of the skilled criticism the Fabians brought to bear on it; and now Mrs. Sidney Webb, who was singled out for attack by the Guild Socialists as the arch Collectivist, is herself conducting an investigation into the existing control of industry by professional organizations, whilst the quondam Guild Socialists are struggling with the difficult question of the proper spheres of the old form of Trade Union now called the craft union, and the new form called the industrial union, in which workers of all crafts and occupations, from clerks and railway porters to locomotive drivers and fitters, are organized in a single union of the entire industry.  There is work enough for many years to some of the old Fabian kind in these directions; and this work will irresistibly reunite the disputants instead of perpetuating a quarrel in which, like most of the quarrels which the Society has survived, there was nothing fundamental at issue.