He does
not do so now.
A great proportion of this sort of man, this energetic directive sort
of man in England, is thinking socialism to-day. They may not be saying
socialism, but they are thinking it. When labour begins to realise what
is adrift it will be divided between two things: between appreciative
co-operation, for which guild socialism in particular has prepared its
mind, and traditional suspicion. I will not over to guess here which
will prevail.
3
The impression I have of the present mental process in the European
communities is that while the official class and the _rentier_ class
is thinking very poorly and inadequately and with a merely obstructive
disposition; while the churches are merely wasting their energies in
futile self-advertisement; while the labour mass is suspicious and
disposed to make terms for itself rather than come into any large
schemes of reconstruction that will abolish profit as a primary aim in
economic life, there is still a very considerable movement towards such
a reconstruction. Nothing is so misleading as a careless analogy. In the
dead years that followed the Napoleonic wars, which are often quoted as
a precedent for expectation now, the spirit of collective service
was near its minimum; it was never so strong and never so manifestly
spreading and increasing as it is to-day.
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