ation of
production. It developed a scheme for the progressive establishment
throughout the world of the 'modern system' in agriculture, a system
that should give the full advantages of a civilised life to every
agricultural worker, and this replacement has been going on right up
to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is the
substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual cultivator, and
for cottage and village life altogether. These guilds are associations
of men and women who take over areas of arable or pasture land, and make
themselves responsible for a certain average produce. They are bodies
small enough as a rule to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and
large enough to supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance
from townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They
have watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but the
ease and the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them to maintain
a group of residences in the nearest town with a common dining-room and
club house, and usually also a guild house in the national or provincial
capital. Already this system has abolished a distinctively 'rustic'
population throughout vast areas of the old world, where it has
prevailed immemorially. That shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel,
the narrow scandals and petty spites and persecutions of the small
village, that hoarding, half inanimate existence away from books,
thought, or social participation and in constant contact with cattle,
pigs, poultry, and their excrement, is passing away out of human
experience. In a little while it will be gone altogether. In the
nineteenth century it had already ceased to be a necessary human state,
and only the absence of any collective intelligence and an imagined need
for tough and unintelligent soldiers and for a prolific class at a low
level, prevented its systematic replacement at that time....

And while this settlement of the country was in progress, the urban
camps of the first phase of the council's activities were rapidly
developing, partly through the inherent forces of the situation and
partly through the council's direction, into a modern type of town....

Section 7

It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises forced
themselves upon the Brissago council, that it was not until the end
of the first year of their administration and then only with extreme
reluctance that they woul