the Gild, elected by the members at the Gildhall at an annual conclave, a code of by-laws was formulated and enforced. The hours of labour were restricted; friction between members checked by the penalisation of insult and of the ill-usage of apprentices by masters; a fixed tariff of prices was promulgated; sumptuary laws enforced, and a standard of craftsmanship maintained by periodic "views" of tools and weights and material. In cases of disability or unemployment, relief was administered from the Communal Chest. The invalid brother was visited by members of his sodality, and, if he died, his body was attended to the graveside by the mourning train of his fellow-craftsmen. But, above all, the Gilds were substantially autonomous and part and parcel of the Angevin Institutional System; they were at once effective guarantees of discipline and morality, and, far from representing mere passive impositions for the maintenance of order and comfort, they crystallised social activities which, proceeding from civic motives, tended to the development not only of the economic potentialities or utilities of a man, but of his political possibilities as well.

Thus did mediaeval theory make provision, in Brentano's words: "To enable any one with a small capital and his labour to earn his daily bread in his trade freely and independently in opposition to the principle of the Rich, freedom of trade".

A moment's reflection will suggest the peril of uncontrolled capitalism and private monopoly when demand was so primitive and so largely local-a danger only equalled at the present time, when the perfection of quick

communication and transport has created controllable world-markets in the ordinary commodities of daily life. This peril the Middle Ages saw; this peril they endeavoured to combat, and the chosen instrument was the Gild System. If modern scholarship has attacked the piety of Mediaevalism, it is day by day re-establishing its intelligence.

Let it be noticed in the first place that if it is upon considerations of security that this system is based, it is a system impregnated with considerations of morality. It is set up primarily to protect economic activities; but, in fact, its characteristic excellence lies in its attempt to guarantee that these activities shall be healthy.

The Christian faith had established the dignity of Labour, the dignity not only of that Finance which had not, in the days of the Republic, seemed unworthy of a Crassus, but also of that Handicraft which, with the bulk of economic and productive activities, had been pronounced by the greatest exponent of Greek civic experience to be unworthy of a citizen.

The Christian Church, further, having provided those model societies after which the early fraternities were built up, even when they did not actually come into existence under her ægis, was responsible for such cardinal criteria of mediaeval economics as the Just Price Theory, and the belief that Usury was sinful. Aquinas, indeed, stands as surely for the close alliance of economics and ethics, as does Machiavelli, in the popular tradition, for the divorce of ethics and political science. That the production and distribution of wealth is to be regulated

by moral principles, and that only so can the Christian State possibly be established, is the first and not the least important consideration which a study of the mediaeval way will suggest to the dissatisfied of the twentieth century.

A standard of life and a standard of craftsmanship are not, at any rate, much less important than a maximum of productivity.

Secondly, the system described presupposes the institution of Private Property.

"If the tendency of legislation," wrote John Stuart Mill, "had been to favour the diffusion, instead of the concentration, of wealth, . . . . . the principle of individual property would have been found to have no necessary connexion with the physical and social evils which almost all Socialist writers assume to be inseparable from it."

Here then is a method of industrial operation which, preserving the peculiar virtue of this institution, by exercising a rigid control of its use, attempts to forestall any anti-social and anti-civic developments which might issue from its abuse. Just as it would be fallacious to suppose that pure communism or pure slavery or a wagenexus were native to the Rural System, so it would be fallacious to suppose that the Gild System contemplates other than an owning class of craftsmen. The serf was "glebae adscriptus": true; but he retained personal property rights in that soil to which he was bound, rights which the force of custom long preserved to him, rights which prevented his entire exploitation at the hands of

the Lord of the Manor. So the craftsman was prevented from plying his little capital for the purpose of exploiting the labour of his less fortunate fellows, or from enjoying dangerous advantages not the outcome of his own differential merit or industry; but such property as his own right hand could accumulate, that, so far as was consistent with the well-being of society, was his own. He was no mere employee of Gild or of municipality.

Now this consideration directs attention toward a characteristic excellence of the mediaeval system to which it is difficult to attach too great importance. Shortly, it substituted for the horizontal division between employer and employee, master and man-to be frank, proprietor and slave a vertical division of society between craft and craft. "It is not to be expected," wrote Mill in 1852, "that the division of the human race into two hereditary classes, employers and employed, can be permanently maintained". It was, in truth, not to be expected; and, by God's Providence, it is not to be expected. Yet it has been maintained, at any rate, until this present year of grace 1912; and in 1912 the politicians, amazed at the stubborn logic of John Anthony Devonport, and grieved at the persistent invalidism of Annie Roberts and other starving non-combatants of Dock-land, prepare, not to efface the gulf between the Port of London Authority and its Employees, but to renovate the old system by making the paddocks on the employee-side of the gulf a little greener-and so a little more tolerable.

The evils of the Wage System, however, are detailed elsewhere in this book; here it is necessary only to point

out that once there was a system of industrial organisation based upon the elimination of such a gulf. One consideration must be especially italicised. The combination of both economic and social and political functions within the sphere of Gild-activity-for the brotherhood which passed by-laws and attended bytt-fillings was the same as that which fought for municipal democracy as well as for trade privilege-reminds us that, suppose a gulf between employers and employees, and we tend on the one hand to divorce the economic from the social and political activities of the artisan, and on the other to widen the cleavage between owners and workers, not merely in the sphere of labour, but in other departments of life. How can men be equals on the political platform if they are master and man in the factory? How can men be citizen-artisans expressing their personalities in their everyday labour, if that labour takes place under another man's roof, under another man's direction, if that labour operates on another man's material, with another's machines, in another's way?

It is necessary, however, at this point, to confront an objection which will almost certainly have been advanced -that in practice the Gild System never worked, never at least in the ideal form which has been claimed for it in the preceding paragraphs.

Upon this point let the position be clear. This is not an archæological treatise, and, while it might be urged that the peculiar excellences of the system endured for a longer period than the more pessimistic of its historians have suggested, the purpose of this chapter is not to de