Page:Roads to freedom.djvu/144

 Cole in his "Self-Government in Industry." Where now," he says, "the State passes a Factory Act, or a Coal Mines Regulation Act, the Guild Congress of the future will pass such Acts, and its power of enforcing them will be the same as that of the State" (p. 98). His ultimate ground for advocating this system is that, in his opinion, it will tend to preserve individual liberty: "The fundamental reason for the preservation, in a democratic Society, of both the industrial and the political forms of social organisation is, it seems to me, that only by dividing the vast power now wielded by industrial capitalism can the individual hope to be free" (p. 91).

Will the system suggested by Mr. Cole have this result? I think it is clear that it would, in this respect, be an improvement on the existing system. Representative government cannot but be improved by any method which brings the representatives into closer touch with the interests concerned in their legislation; and this advantage probably would be secured by handing over questions of production to the Guild Congress. But if the Guild Congress became all-powerful in such questions, if resistance to its will by a Guild which felt ill-used became practically hopeless, I fear that the evils now connected with the omnipotence of the State would soon reappear. Trade Union officials, as soon as they become part of the governing forces in the country, tend to become autocratic and conservative; they lose touch with their constituents, and gravitate, by a psychological sympathy, into