Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/235

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statisticians and hierarchs are exacting what will look very much like rent, as defined by our authors in the same passage. If the capitalistic manager's salary is only to be replaced by the Guild hierarch's higher pay, will the difference be really essential? Every one who has read Dumas remembers how Chicot the Jester induced Frère Gorenflot to eat a fowl on Friday by making him christen it a carp. But Gorenflot wanted to eat the fowl and was quite ready to be humbugged. Will that very shrewd person, the British wage-earner, be equally ready to be duped by a change of name, when he is asked to hand over "surplus value "to hierarchs instead of managers?

Messrs. Hobson-Orage admit frankly the likelihood of strife between the various Guilds. "We may expect," they say (page 228), "dissatisfaction among the weaker Guilds when the stronger from time to time impose their wills, that is, in the last resort, exercise their 'pull.' In what direction, then, can we reasonably anticipate dissatisfaction, followed by strenuous agitation for rectification? Primarily, we imagine in the value each Guild sets upon its own labour, which may be disputed by the other Guilds. In our chapter 'The Finance of the Guilds,' we remarked that in the earlier