strictly
egalitarian ideal, we find again that the remains of the thing to-day
are so distorted and disconnected as to be comic. There are City
Companies which inherit the coats of arms and the immense relative
wealth of the old Guilds, and inherit nothing else. Even what is good
about them is not what was good about the Guilds. In one case we shall
find something like a Worshipful Company of Bricklayers, in which, it is
unnecessary to say, there is not a single bricklayer or anybody who has
ever known a bricklayer, but in which the senior partners of a few big
businesses in the City, with a few faded military men with a taste in
cookery, tell each other in after-dinner speeches that it has been the
glory of their lives to make allegorical bricks without straw. In
another case we shall find a Worshipful Company of Whitewashers who do
deserve their name, in the sense that many of them employ a large number
of other people to whitewash. These Companies support large charities
and often doubtless very valuable charities; but their object is quite
different from that of the old charities of the Guilds. The aim of the
Guild charities was the same as the aim of the Common Land. It was to
resist inequality--or, as some earnest old gentlemen of the last
generation would probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to ensure,
not only that bricklaying should survive and succeed, but that every
bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to rebuild the ruins of
any bricklayer, and to give any faded whitewasher a new white coat. It
was the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their cobblers like their
shoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the
weakest link, or go after the hundredth sheep; in short, to keep the row
of little shops unbroken like a line of battle. It resisted the growth
of a big shop like the growth of a dragon. Now even the whitewashers of
the Whitewashers Company will not pretend that it exists to prevent a
small shop being swallowed by a big shop, or that it has done anything
whatever to prevent it. At the best the kindness it would show to a
bankrupt whitewasher would be a kind of compensation; it would not be
reinstatement; it would not be the restoration of status in an
industrial system. So careful of the type it seems, so careless of the
single life; and by that very modern evolutionary philosophy the type
itself has been destroyed. The old Guilds, with the same object of
equality