admit to-day that status at its best is a better thing than
contract at its best--that the soldier is a nobler figure than the army
contractor, and that corporate feeling and professional honour are a
better stimulus to right action than business competition and a laudable
keenness to give satisfaction to a valuable customer. We have always
suffered from the temptation in this country of adapting business
methods and ideals to politics rather than political ideals and methods
to business. Our eighteenth-century thinkers explained citizenship
itself, not as a duty to our neighbours but as the fulfilment of an
unwritten contract. Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the
idea of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in somewhat
the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day, when they are at a
loss for a popular watchword, call for a business government. Such
theories and battle-cries may serve for a 'nation of shopkeepers'; but
that opprobrious phrase has never been true of the great mass of the
English people, and it was never less true than to-day.

The idea of industrial work as the fulfilment of a contract, whether
freely or forcibly made, is thus essentially at variance with the ideal
of community service. It is difficult for a man who makes his livelihood
by hiring himself out as an individual for what he can get out of one
piece of work after another to feel the same sense of community service
or professional pride as the man who is serving a vocation and has
dedicated his talents to some continuous and recognized form of work. It
is this which makes the system of wage-labour so unsatisfactory in
principle compared with the guilds of the town workmen in the Middle
Ages and with the organized professions of to-day; and it is this which
explains why trade unions of recent years have come to concern
themselves more and more with questions of status rather than of wages
and to regard the occupation which they represent more and more as a
profession rather than a trade. No one has laid bare the deficiencies of
the wage-system more clearly than Adam Smith in the famous chapter in
which he foreshadows the principle of collective bargaining. 'What are
the common wages of labour', he there remarks,[79]

'depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between
those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same.
The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as