Societies of Producers, forgetful of the vision, have become, when they have endured, transformed into societies of capitalists, conceding to employees a share in profits, that in this country, indeed, such degeneration has been normal, refuses to believe that co-operation is other than an instrument of transition and denies it the name of a principle of social reform.

Hence Mrs. Sidney Webb, with her Gambetta-like faith in universal suffrage and her Cromwellian distrust of democracy, decides that the first objection to profitand-loss-sharing "as a wage system or as a substitute for a wage system" (the equivalent illustrates rather well the characteristic inability of bureaucrats to appreciate spiritual distinctions) is an absence of principle, and that "the mere fact that you band together ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred manual workers and set them to perform the same operation does not decrease this difficulty". If Mrs. Webb could conceive of this nation as a people at work under the worst possible conditions instead of as a mass of labour-power waiting to be "not ignobly" engaged by a capitalist or a municipality, she would be able to appreciate the value of labourpower being exercised on the same commodity as the best of all principles of cohesion, and the spiritual glory of a system which would lend a vision to what must generally be but an uninspiring process.

But these two stumbling blocks are ultimately reducible to the one ultimate historical difficulty that the capitalist, in order to regiment and cheapen the labour market, has broken down the nuclei of association and shattered the fabric of fellowship. Industrial democracy

has been levelled out of the world by the peine forte et dure of the wage-system. But if democracy is even possible for nations, it is a fortiori possible within groups. If you deny it for the latter, you deny it for the former. The instinct is there but it has been crushed and hidden away: the reality was there but it has been crushed and forgotten. First, then, the instinct must be revived: then the reality will be reconstructed. Then the democratisation of industry will bring in its train the spiritualisation of production. Slaves make stools. Citizens make thrones.

The purpose of this book then is to indicate the absolute need of creating a body of English opinion in favour of an associative ideal capable itself of creating an associative spirit; and it is from such a spirit that any definite structural achievement must proceed. We would revive the instinct for association in the art of life, in order that, when the power of capital is curbed, the wage relation modified, economic resources redistributed, the opportunity may not be lost for the building anew of the old institutions.

We would that England were built so; for it is in truth no vain, no unloving, no un-English thing-this dear, human gospel of fellowship.

N. J. S.

CHAPTER VI.

THE PROCESS OF REPOSSESSION.

IT remains now to suggest the appropriate means by which a society founded upon a distributive economic basis can be developed out of the existing anarchy of temper and organisation.

But before attempting such a discussion, we shall in the interests of clearness first briefly review some of those basic facts which emerged in the previous chapters.

First, then, society in its present condition is intolerable for the mass of men; its economic structure is unhinged, and it is itself socially degrading and politically dangerous.

Secondly, it is unstable; it is necessarily in a state of inequilibrium, and must therefore either end in a revolution, the force and extent of which will grow with delay, or must else continue to proceed rapidly along the lines already discernible and so lose grip of that energy which alone can save it from degradation. Such a process

would almost certainly be in the direction of giving a basic and legal operation to those de facto economic relations with which the present legal system, framed as it is for other circumstances, is finding itself in continuous and increasing conflict.

Thirdly, just as an analysis of contemporary economic phenomena leads to the conclusion that at bottom the present economic breakdown proceeds from the divorce of the mass of the population from the ownership of the means of production, so also an examination of the course of history must convince the inquirer that our characteristic social and economic evils were created and accentuated in precise correspondence with the continuous and increasingly rapid dispossession of the average man, who, as we have shown, was finally left without property and brought into a position of dependence upon the increasingly few people into whose hands ownership had accumulated.

Fourthly, if human liberty is to be restored in any real and lasting sense, if political life is to be made universally possible and not left as a mere leisurely hobby for a few, if production is to be sanely moulded to men's needs, then-whatever else may be required-at any rate the life of the average man must rest on a solid economic basis: in other words, property must be restored to him. The tide must be deliberately and courageously stemmed and reversed. That evil process, by which the dispossession of the ordinary man was accomplished and his degradation completed, must give place to a process by which he shall be enfranchised with property. The common man must cease to be a mere machine to grind out toll for those who condescend to use his labour. He must become a free man in a free state, and be clothed with all the habiliments of citizenship.

Such, in outline, are the main conclusions that we have to bear in mind for our guidance when discussing

the appropriate means by which the kind of society we desire can be made a concrete reality.

In the search for such means we must realise one cardinal factor very clearly. It is this. If a society is suffering from a disease which is mainly economic, the curative force we employ must itself be economic, and must proceed from principles and motives contrary to those which give rise to the disease. The disease, so far as it is economic, is the concentration of ownership in a few hands. The remedy must be the diffusion of ownership into many hands, into as many as possible. Thus on its economic side the first problem may be stated as follows: How can we defeat this tendency to overpossession by the few, and achieve the enfranchisement in severalty of the many?

Now this project, though in its nature simple and easy of comprehension, is yet surrounded by many difficulties and obstructions. And the chief difficulty is one that resides not in the nature of the project itself but in the temperament, outlook and vitality of the people who should carry the matter through.

It is impossible to regard society as a purely mechanical organism, the movement of which can be precisely calculated by observing the power and direction of the various forces that operate through it; it is foolish to regard it as the result of a purely fortuitous evolution, moulded by powers and agencies which come we know not whence and operate as though in a predestined way. Human institutions are neither such a thing as the first nor such a product as the second. On the contrary they embody and give objective expression to the ideas,