THE RECONSTRUCTION OF INDUSTRY 27 
in a trade, of trades in industry, would need an elaborate hierachy 
of representative government, with a supreme legislature and 
executive, whose will must over-rule the will of the national or 
local groups within the several trades, as to the quantity and 
method of work to be done in each concrete process, and as to 
the remuneration of each sort of work. In other words, society, 
as a whole, would have imposed its final control upon each 
group of workers, diminishing to that extent their power to de- 
termine the conditions under which they would work, and their 
effective separate ownership of the instruments of production. 
The ideal of the self-governing mine, or factory, or railway, 
would thus be over-ridden by the superior ideal of a self-governing 
society. But that self-government by society, the supreme leg- 
islation of industry, could not perform its work by confining 
its attention to the various productive processes, and the busi- 
nesses and trades in which they were conducted. It would be 
compelled to study the wants and will of the consumers, or, if it 
be preferred, of the workers in their capacity of consumers. For, 
only by the study of the consumer, or the market, could the work 
of adjusting the application of productive power at the different 
productive points, and the process of remuneration by which 
that distribution was achieved, possibly be accomplished. Thus, 
although the whole body of this syndicalist legislature might 
have been elected to represent the interests of separate groups 
of producers, or trades, it would be compelled to give equal atten- 
tion to the wants and the will of the consuming public. But it 
would discover that, just in proportion as it was accurately 
representative of the separate interests of groups of producers, 
to that extent was it disqualified for safeguarding the interests 
of the consuming public, which in each concrete problem would 
be liable to cut across the interests of special groups of producers. 
In other words, it would be impossible properly to regulate the 
railway service without direct regard to the interests of the 
travelling and trading public as a whole, to regulate the mining 
industry without regard to the local, seasonal and other needs 
of coal consumers. But these consumers’ interests could not be 
properly considered in a legislature chosen entirely by separate 
groups of producers, with the object of promoting the special in- 
26"