as compared with any other system that has yet been devised. For it means that we have to work to satisfy the wishes of our fellows, as expressed in their demand for goods and services. Their demand may be ill-judged and faulty, but it is real and human, and it is the expression of individual choice freely exercised. Under State Socialism the value of our work—what we could get for it—would apparently be the reward which Government officials thought fit to award to us. We should be working not to please the ordinary human being with all his faults and foibles, but to earn the approval of an inspector, whose decision would be based on red-tape rules and formulas drawn up and enunciated and annotated in offices tenanted by beings who, from the nature of their duties, would be more or less out of sympathy with common humanity. Under Guild Socialism, as will be seen later, every guild would apparently work largely according to the fancy of its members; and how they would arrive at a decision of the value of the work so done—that is at a basis on which their products should be exchanged—is one of the many problems that the advocates of the system do not seem yet to have fairly faced.
Capitalism leaves the question of the value of
