CHAPTER I. THE PROCESS OF DISPOSSESSION. "The ONCE upon a time there came down from the Thessalian Plains southward to the city of Athens a man dissatisfied. He entered the Agora and he came upon Sokrates. "Sir," cried he, "I am a very miserable fool." thing is possible," said Sokrates. went on the discontented one, "been striving these thirty years to build in Thessaly a Parthenon. And lo, I can only manage a mud hut." "Take heart, my friend," "For here have I," cried Sokrates, "for you are in better case than most. For there are few enough of men who try to build a Parthenon, and, of the few, the most part build themselves a mud hut and take it for a Parthenon." And the Thessalian went back to Thessaly and built his temple. The dissatisfied of the twentieth century-for the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is certainly denounced by a few and regretted by many-rest most of them content to set up more mud huts that shall rival those now about us, content to trust faintly the larger hope that these will not only oust their rival huts, but will themselves become Parthenons. But among these dissatisfied there are already some who feel uneasily that in spite of the teeming evidences of the successful exploitation of Nature's resources by Man's invention, there must be to-day a pulling-down of mud huts and a building-up of things more beautiful. And again of these not a few have already perceived that though Collectivism is an enthusiasm for the better and on that account deserves much honour, yet the achievement of the Collectivists is and must be no Parthenon but a mud hut, that a hope so faint as theirs is nothing but pessimism cloaked. "History," someone said, "is a sound Aristocrat." Modern reformers believe that she is also a sound Capitalist. And Destiny seems to most folk the child of History, the replica of its parent. To combat this pessimism it is necessary to call attention to the instant and vital relation of economic history to the economic status of to-day, and to italicise the even closer connexion between the political history of this country and its economic development, in order that it may be evident that the concentration of wealth and the process of dispossession was largely wilful, and not at all inevitable. For its causes are not mysterious and wonderful, but ascertainable and even a little sordid. The story must begin with the mediaeval welter, for recent research has only confirmed the catastrophic view of the Dark Ages which succeeded the economic ruin of the Romanised peoples and the military annihilation of the Roman governmental system. There existed during the Middle Ages, most com pletely and perfectly during the latter half of the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries, a system of industrial organisation, based on moral principles, functioned by society itself-and represented by the Gilds, Confronted with a social and political fabric hostile in the last degree to economic enterprise except so far as it might be exploited in its own interests, the artisans, after the fashion of the ecclesiastical cloister and the mercantile caravan, organised themselves into societies or Gilds, every one representing a particular craft, to obtain, and thenceforth to maintain, the privilege of carrying on a trade. Thus it was that the heart of mediaeval industry was the Gilds. They protected alike the Labourer and the Consumer, maintained a standard of craftsmanship fully worth the adulation of Mr. Penty-that standard of Salisbury and Chartres and Tattershall, and maintained a standard of life which William Morris the artist and Thorold Rogers the scientist have united to extol and to regret. The genius of this System was the fellowship of all those engaged in the several industries; the protection of the unlucky in an industry; the restraint of the dishonest; in fine, a co-operation not in the labour itself, but in the maintenance of a milieu favourable to the discharge of the labour and of circumstances conducive to a high standard of life in general for the participants. This last point is of special importance, and will be noticed again: historically it is expressed in the fact that while the Gild was, in one aspect, a "mistery," in another it was a "fraternity". By the Council of |