Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/237

 delimitation of work, and if such large questions were to be settled in the same spirit, it would prove of ill-omen to the future greatness of the Guilds. But the Guilds, as we have pictured them, are not the existing unions, but the unions plus the practical intellectuals, the labour and brains of each Guild naturally evolving a hierarchy to which large issues of industrial policy might with confidence be referred."

If the practical intellectuals are to include such exponents of Guild doctrine as Messrs. Cole and Hobson-Orage, the specimens which have already been quoted of their dialectical methods and their controversial geniality seem to promise that the world of the National Guilds will have a pleasant resemblance to Donnybrook Fair. Messrs. Reckitt and Bechhofer in their book already referred to dealt with the question of inter-Guild strife as follows (page 325). "A query often brought to confound National Guildsmen is this: What would happen to a National Guild that began to work wholly according to its own pleasure, without regard to the other Guilds and the rest of the community? We may reply, first, that this spirit would be as unnatural among the Guilds as it is natural nowadays with the present anti-communal capitalist system of industry;" [but