istoric riddles to be
unpicked in the similar forms of social address. There is something
singularly forlorn about the modern word "Mister." Even in sound it has
a simpering feebleness which marks the shrivelling of the strong word
from which it came. Nor, indeed, is the symbol of the mere sound
inaccurate. I remember seeing a German story of Samson in which he bore
the unassuming name of Simson, which surely shows Samson very much
shorn. There is something of the same dismal _diminuendo_ in the
evolution of a Master into a Mister.

The very vital importance of the word "Master" is this. A Guild was,
very broadly speaking, a Trade Union in which every man was his own
employer. That is, a man could not work at any trade unless he would
join the league and accept the laws of that trade; but he worked in his
own shop with his own tools, and the whole profit went to himself. But
the word "employer" marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern use
of the word "master" quite inexact. A master meant something quite other
and greater than a "boss." It meant a master of the work, where it now
means only a master of the workmen. It is an elementary character of
Capitalism that a shipowner need not know the right end of a ship, or a
landowner have even seen the landscape, that the owner of a goldmine may
be interested in nothing but old pewter, or the owner of a railway
travel exclusively in balloons. He may be a more successful capitalist
if he has a hobby of his own business; he is often a more successful
capitalist if he has the sense to leave it to a manager; but
economically he can control the business because he is a capitalist,
not because he has any kind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highest
grade in the Guild system was a Master, and it meant a mastery of the
business. To take the term created by the colleges in the same epoch,
all the mediaeval bosses were Masters of Arts. The other grades were the
journeyman and the apprentice; but like the corresponding degrees at the
universities, they were grades through which every common man could
pass. They were not social classes; they were degrees and not castes.
This is the whole point of the recurrent romance about the apprentice
marrying his master's daughter. The master would not be surprised at
such a thing, any more than an M.A. would swell with aristocratic
indignation when his daughter married a B.A.

When we pass from the strictly educational hierarchy to the