WORK AND WEALTH 
merely supplies no safeguard against this abuse of power, but 
would almost certainly evoke it, unless a potent control, rep- 
resenting industry in general, were established over the indi- 
vidual trades or guilds. Experience of cases where local trade- 
unions are occasionally placed in a position of tyranny shows 
that they will play for their own hand with a disregard to the 
interests of their fellow-workers in other trades as callous as is 
displayed by any trust of capitalists. Assuming, then, that it 
were possible for guild-societies to develop to the point that the 
workers in each trade were in possession of all the instruments 
of production, and were able to conduct the processes efficiently, 
the problem of distributing the ‘surplus’ among the several 
trades or guilds, in the shape of pay or leisure, would still re- 
main unsolved. Among the groups of producers, in a word, there 
would remain divergencies of interest, which would be incapable, 
upon a producers’ policy, of solution. Syndicalists, confronted 
with this phase of their problem, plunge into vague assurances 
that the process of agreement which had taken place between the 
workers in the several processes and the several businesses in a 
trade, could be extended to the workers grouped in the larger 
trade-units, and that the real solidarity of working-class interests 
would somehow instinctively express itself in equitable and 
durable arrangements. But the moment one passes from the 
region of phrases to that of concrete facts the difficulties thicken. 
An elected council of national workers would have to devise 
some practicable method of comparing units of railway service 
with units of mining, bricklaying, doctoring, acting, waiting, etc., 
so as to apply to each productive process the support and stimu- 
lus needed to induce the workers engaged in it to do their share 
of work and to receive their share of wealth. No mere time 
basis for such competition would be practicable. It would be 
necessary to induce a body of labour and capital to apply itself 
to each process of each occupation, sufficient in quantity and in 
efficiency to supply the requirements of the working community 
as a whole, and to devise a mode of remuneration, or distribution 
of products, which would satisfy this requirement. 
It is quite evident that all this adjustment of the claims and 
needs of individuals within a process in a business, of businesses 
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