ship of the means of production" as long as "control of each industry or 'guild'" was "vested in the membership of the industry." A strong central government was both necessary and desirable, Follett argued—but only if it was balanced by strong households, strong neighborhoods, and strong workingmen's "guilds."

Herbert Croly, whose Promise of American Life (1910) provided the ideological underpinning for Theodore Roosevelt's "New Nationalism," took a position similar to Follett's in his Progressive Democracy, a more radical book than the book for which he is better known. As we have seen, Croly conceded the force of conservative objections to a welfare state but took issue with the conservatives' conclusion that "the wage-earner can secure independence only by becoming a property-owner." Responsibility, not property ownership as such, was the real issue. ^* The "most important single task of modern democratic social organization" was to transfer responsibility for production to the workers. Only in this way could "wage-earners ... become free men." Croly rejected the syndicalists' "abhorrent" methods but commended them for having introduced a "necessary ferment" into the labor movement. He too believed that workers should have the "opportunity and responsibility of operating the business mechanism of modern life." Although he deplored violence, he agreed with the syndicalists that workers could be trained for "self-government" only in the school of class "warfare." Their "independence ... would not amount to much," he thought, if it was "handed down to them by the state or by employers' associations."

Like Cole, Croly believed that Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management might precipitate a struggle for workers' control of production. The unions could not be expected to welcome appeals for greater efficiency as long as the "elimination of waste" served merely to speed up

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In all likelihood, Croly took this idea directly from Cole's World of Labour. Cole wrote, "Not the sense of ownership, but the sense of responsibility, is the secret of the success of the small agriculturist.... The sense of being owned is deadening; the sense of possession means, not so much that a man desires to have the title-deeds of his estate, as that he desires to work for himself and the community and not for a private master. ... The new spirit cannot come unless every worker can be made to feel ... responsible for the work he has to do."

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