[92]. In North Carolina the recently organized State Bureau of Community Service—made up of the administrators of the Department of Agriculture, the Board of Health, the Normal and Industrial College and the Farmers’ Union, with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction as its central executive—is making its immediate work the development of local community organization which shall be directly articulated with a unified state organization.
[93]. The Community Council, however, is not to duplicate other organizations but first to coördinate all existing agencies before planning new activities.
[94]. And spontaneously many towns and villages turned to the schoolhouse as the natural centre of its war services.
[95]. For the moment I ignore the occupational group to be considered later.
[96]. I have taken this account from the official report. I have been told by New York people that these commissions have shown few signs of life. This does not, however, seem to me to detract from the value of the plan as a suggestion, or as indication of what is seen to be advisable if not yet wholly practicable. The New York charter provides for Local Improvement Boards as connecting links with the central government, but these I am told have shown no life whatever.
[97]. Léon Duguit, Graham Wallis, Arthur Christensen, Norman Angell, etc.
[98]. The fatal flaw of guild socialism is this separation of economics and politics. First, the interests of citizenship and guild-membership are not distinct; secondly, in any proper system of occupational representation every one should be included—vocational representation should not be trade representation; third, as long as you call the affairs of the guilds “material,” and say that the politics of the state should be purified of financial interests, you burn every bridge which might make a unity of financial interests and sound state policy. Guild socialism, however, because it is a carefully worked out plan for the control of industry by those who take part in it, is one of the most well worth considering of the proposals at present before us.
[99]. See G. D. H. Cole, “The World of Labor,” for the relation of trade unionism to guild socialism.
[100]. See especially “Churches in the Modern State” and “Studies in Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius.”
[101]. See also Mr. Laski’s articles: “The Personality of Associations,” Harv. Law Rev. 29, 404–426, and “Early History of the Corporation in England,” Harv. Law Rev.: 30, 561–588. This is the kind of work which is breaking the way for a new conception of politics.