own form of organization in a haze of romanticism, and then to compare it with a savagely realist presentation of the territorial democracy which constitutes the present "state."

There seem, it is true, in the Middle Ages to have been cases, mainly in architecture and the arts of painting, sculpture, and jewelry, where uncontrolled vocational organization produced excellent results. Small groups of men, organized locally as painters' or builders' or jewelers' guilds, encouraged each other to develop their art under the impulse of the sheer delight of creation and often under the leadership of some dominant personality. Perhaps the groups of jurists who at Bologna and elsewhere developed the reconstruction of Roman law could have been described as guilds. But the guilds generally were destroyed by their tendency to form hereditary monopolies, and their inability either to make new inventions themselves, or to adapt themselves to the new conditions resulting from the inventions of outsiders, or to combine effectively for the general purposes of good government. The rise of natural science in the seventeenth century was accomplished by individuals, or by free associations of enquirers (like the Royal Society or the Academy of Science) sometimes patronized by a monarchical state and opposed by the guild associations of the Universities and the Church. The introduction of machineindustry in the eighteenth century was accomplished by individuals or free associations of capitalists usually working in places chosen because they were outside the range of guild jurisdiction, and was opposed, broadly speaking, both by such relics of guild organization as remained, and by the new Trade Unions.

The problem of the proper function of vocational organization was definitely raised in Britain during the war. At the risk of national defeat we were forced to consider how a particular group of manual industries-those concerned with the production of munitions, food, and clothing-should be carried on so as to produce the maximum result. We were forced to practise economy in the selection and use of natural ability and in the creation and use of acquired skill. We sought for persons of both sexes possessing special ability, and tried to secure that they should be freed from all work which persons of less ability could perform, and given posts which offered full scope for their powers. We decided what proportion of specially able persons could be most economically assigned to the army and navy, and what proportion to industry. In particular, we looked for the kind of natural ability which produces inventions, and tried to secure that every inventor should be encouraged to develop his ideas, and that every successful invention should be exploited as immediately and as widely as possible. In training men and women for each industry-whether they were persons of exceptional ability or not-we aimed at producing the maximum amount of personal skill in the minimum time and with the minimum of teaching effort. We gave the name of "dilution" to the whole process of economizing natural ability by the grading of work, and of economizing skill by its rapid production and organized distribution. As a result, in spite of many blunders, we were able both to maintain a huge army in the field and to multiply by perhaps two or three our national production of the certain forms of wealth. And, in spite of universal anxiety, insufficiency of food, and long hours, most

of those who worked under the new conditions seem to have felt something more like zest in their work than was common in British working-class life before the war. Most of the Trade Unions submitted to this process because they shared the general recognition of the national crisis; but it was clear that the effective force which brought it about came rather from the political organization of the nation than from its vocational organization.

After the war we were faced by two needs, both urgent, though less urgent than the avoidance of defeat in war. One was the reabsorption of the mobilized men into industry, with speed and economy in teaching them the necessary skill; and the other was the provision of houses, in presence of an admitted shortage in the supply of workmen for the building trades, and the admitted fact that such inventions as the "fountain trowel" and "spray painting" made possible an immediate and enormous economy of labor in building. In both cases the state pressed forward, and the vocational organizations hesitated or resisted. If the state had been abolished, or if its place as final arbiter had been taken, as Mr. Cole suggests, by a federation of vocational bodies, no power would, I am convinced, have existed powerful enough to overcome, even to the degree which was actually achieved, that hesitation and resistance.

8 See my Great Society, Chap. XIII. 9 Social Theory (1920), p. 136.

CHAPTER VI

PROFESSIONALISM

N the last chapter I approached the relation between vocationalism and other forms of social control by

I

taking the problem as a whole; in this chapter I shall approach the same problem by choosing certain particular vocations-law, medicine, the army, and teaching. I have chosen "professions" rather than Trade Unions, because the history of trade unionism among British manual workers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been, not merely the development of a form of social organization, but also a struggle between the masses and the classes for the possession of the national means of production. I shall so be enabled to avoid some of the confusion arising from that struggle; since most of the members of the professions which I have chosen are either above or near the economic average of the nation, and since the means of production are not owned in these cases by a propertied class.

I will begin with the ancient and closely organized profession of the law. In 1916, when it was still doubtful whether the national need for munitions would over

come the average trade unionist's shrinking from change of habit and his difficulty in preferring national to vocational interests, the Law Times (the organ of the solicitors) wrote (on January 8) that "The growing sense of responsibility in trade union circles should make it possible to arrive at a satisfactory solution . with regard to the dilution of labor. Public opinion is sufficiently strong nowadays to ensure that the trade unionists here will be as patriotic as their confrères in France and Germany." It obviously never occurred to the Editor of the Law Times that the same appeal and the same threat could ever be addressed to his own profession. During the war no attempt was made to introduce "dilution" into the two privileged sections (solicitors and barristers) of the legal profession; more women and boys were used in the subordinate work of the lawyers' clerks who do not belong to the profession; but women were not introduced into the profession itself until Parliament, women having been enfranchised, passed after the war a statute forbidding their exclusion.1 Neither during nor after the war has anything, as far as I know, been done to throw either branch of the profession open to able members of hitherto excluded social classes, or (except to a minor extent in the case of young men who have done military service) to shorten and economize the process of training, or to secure by any method of dilution that no member

1 On this point the opposition of interest and feeling between the middle-class professions and the working-class Trade Unions creates a real though hitherto insufficient force on the side of the public good. Mrs. Alderton at the 1920 meeting of the Women's Liberal Federation said, "The Labor Party was doing its utmost to open the professions to women, and the professional classes were doing their utmost to see that the trades were open to women” (Westminster Gazette, May 12, 1920).