Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/214

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that National Guilds must therefore assure to the workers at least the following things (page 155):—

"1. Recognition and payment as a human being, and not merely as the mortal tenement of so much labour power for which an efficient demand exists.

"2. Consequently, payment in employment and in unemployment, in sickness and in health alike.

"3. Control of the organization of production in co-operation with his fellows.

"4, A claim upon the product of his work, also exercised in co-operation with his fellows."

Very well then: what the National Guilds are aiming at is that everybody is to be paid merely because they are alive, and not because they are "mortal tenements of labour for which an efficient demand exists." To those of us who suffer from the alluring but at present unprofitable habit of slothfulness this seems to be an extremely attractive programme. The right to be kept alive has of course been recognized grudgingly by the Poor Law for many centuries, but the Poor Law has doled out subsistence under conditions which are generally admitted to have been inhuman. Now, if the National Guildsmen reconstruct society,