of young men, and is rapidly gaining ground among
those who will form Labor opinion in years to come.
The power of the State has been so much increased
during the war that those who naturally dislike
things as they are, find it more and more difficult to
believe that State omnipotence can be the road to the
millennium. Guild Socialists aim at autonomy in
industry, with consequent curtailment, but not abolition,
of the power of the State. The system which
they advocate is, I believe, the best hitherto proposed,
and the one most likely to secure liberty without
the constant appeals to violence which are to be
feared under a purely Anarchist regime.

[35] The ideas of Guild Socialism were first set forth in
``National Guilds,'' edited by A. R. Orage (Bell & Sons, 1914),
and in Cole's ``World of Labour'' (Bell & Sons), first published
in 1913. Cole's ``Self-Government in Industry'' (Bell &
Sons, 1917) and Rickett & Bechhofer's ``The Meaning of
National Guilds'' (Palmer & Hayward, 1918) should also be
read, as well as various pamphlets published by the National
Guilds League. The attitude of the Syndicalists to Guild
Socialism is far from sympathetic. An article in ``The
Syndicalist'' for February, 1914, speaks of it in the following
terms: a Middle-class of the middle-class, with all the shortcomings
(we had almost said `stupidities') of the middle-
classes writ large across it, `Guild Socialism' stands forth
as the latest lucubration of the middle-class mind. It is a
`cool steal' of the leading ideas of Syndicalism and a deliberate
perversion of them. . . . We do protest against the `State'