PREFACE.

THREE members of the Rota Club, in these its first Essays, have sought to explain and defend the principle of Property. They have therefore referred that principle to the record of the past, to present fact, and to certain root principles in morals and politics.

They believe that the lesson to be learnt from such reference is this:

The characteristic virtue of Property can be retained only in a state where property is possessed by at least so many as a determining majority of the citizens, and by each of these in severalty.

Political power, in a nation-state like England, necessarily depends on economic resource. Therefore, although there are other kinds of property, each of them capable of fulfilling a human need, it is for Property in the Means of Production that Englishmen to-day should keep their immediate and most definite concern.

Such means are external to the producer himself, and may be said, if a wide meaning be given to

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each of the two words, to consist chiefly in Land and Capital.

The required separate properties may thus take the form either of Land, or, wherever association is good, of Shares in a producing body. (The same citizen might possess property in both forms.)

There exists already a name which, though not exactly the right one, does fit the general character of such a body closely enough to justify the provisional use of it in this book. That name is 'Gild'.

The Gild should consist of associated producers: they should be at once members of it and shareholders in it. From the Gild a standard should be required by the State, which should also enforce,

necessary, those of the Gild's rules or by-laws which were involved in its approved constitution. Such Gilds should form the chief and determining type of industrial government, and the word "Associative" will be used in this book of a state whose industrial character is thus determined by the character of the Gild.

In short, the characteristic virtue of Property can be retained wherever property is kept so distributed as to remain a normal thing to the average man; and it can be so kept among the citizens of an Associative State.

Those who believe this will find themselves opposed both to the existing state of things in

England, and also to certain current schemes of

reform.

They will oppose that existing state if only because in this country to-day property in the means of production is normal only to a few.

They will oppose Collectivism, or Socialism, if only because they do not desire the chief type of industrial government to be that of the State.

They will oppose Syndicalism, because, for instance, they do desire the existence of a strong political State, distinct from the Gilds, and are willing for industrial government by such a State to form one type, though not the chief.

They will not be able to appraise out of its context any of the more particular remedies or movements, such as Co-partnership, Co-operation, Small Holdings, or Land Banks. They will approve any one of such just so far as it forms a proper part of that whole proposal whose main outlines this book will endeavour to indicate. But the faith must be kept whole, and any of these things, if it be an isolated reform or exist in an evil context, may itself prove evil.

The writers of this book do not claim that there is anything new, "up-to-date," "advanced" or startling in what they propose; they would hope rather that it may appeal to what is normal, whole, and permanent.

They do not suppose, however, that there is, as distinct from this wholeness in the creed itself, that unity in the presentation of it which would have been possible if the book were written by one. And they therefore ask that criticism may be directed at what they have said rather than at the manner in which they have on this occasion jointly said it.

Each of them would like to acknowledge his debt to the other two, and to join with them in acknowledging a common debt to their fellowmembers of the Rota Club. But a greater than either of these is that of the Club itself to several living writers, and especially to that one of them from whom the Club derived its own first impulse, and also the main character of this creed that it holds.