Workers' control of production offered the only cure for apathy and the only solid basis for democratic citizenship. Wage labor amounted to a form of slavery, and it was on these grounds that it had to be resisted.

It is too little realised, even by Socialists—especially by Marxians—that the whole question of the control of industry is not economic but ethical. The attempt to found "justice" on the theory of value revives the old conception of individual natural right in its least defensible form. The right of Labour to a life of comfort and self-expression is quite independent of whether it creates all wealth or not.

Socialists advocated "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work" instead of attacking the wage system itself, the real source of the worker's suffering. Slavery, not poverty, was the "fundamental evil." Socialists "fixed their eyes upon the material misery of the poor without realizing that it rests upon the spiritual degradation of the slave."

Guild socialists regarded trade unions as embryonic governments, not simply as agencies through which workers could bargain for higher wages and better working conditions. In referring to unions as "guilds," they did not intend to revive a medieval system of production, although some of them, notably A. J. Penty, had absorbed from Ruskin and Morris an abiding admiration for the Middle Ages. Cole reminded his readers that "the twentieth century is not the fourteenth," but he still believed that the term "guilds" served to call attention to a "morality in industry which we have lost and which it is important to restore." Unions had to be conceived far more broadly than they had been conceived in the past. With proper encouragement, they could become educational institutions, the modern equivalent of apprenticeship, in which workers would acquire the technical knowledge without which they could not expect to

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