ever—the constraints of "practicality"—he had no way of addressing them very effectively. Instead of making the "deepest human needs" his starting point, he could only bring them in as an afterthought, reminding himself that "unorganized spirit" should not be lost in the rage for organization. He was too honest to conceal his uneasy awareness that such a procedure left something to be desired. "The impression conveyed by this book," he admitted, "... may be that of a terrible and bewildering complexity of social organization in which the individual will be lost." ^*

His concessions to Fabian socialism went beyond matters of argumentative style. He made substantive concessions too, which nullified much of guild socialism's potential appeal. Having boldly declared, in The World of Labour, that when socialism ignored the producer it became a "dead theory incapable of inspiring enthusiasm or bringing about a change of heart," he immediately retreated into the cautious reminder that the producer's interests had to be balanced against the consumer's. If socialism neglected the consumer, he said, it would "fall into sectional egoism and lose the element of community and brotherhood in individualism and self-esteem."

The trouble with this characteristically judicious formulation was that workers were more likely to find "community and brotherhood" in the "sectional egoism" of class warfare than in carefully designed proposals for a new constitution in which everybody's interest would find appropriate mechanisms of representation. "Individualism and self-esteem,"

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*	"I accept my full share of the blame," Cole wrote in The Next Ten Years (1929), for the "excesses of Guild Socialist system-making." The movement took the "wrong turning," he said, "when it ceased to be an idea and aimed at being a system. Then the life went out of it."

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