present even when they refuse to recognize it. In the writings and talk of men about international affairs to-day, in the current discussions of historians and political journalists, there is an effect of drunken men growing sober, and terribly afraid of growing sober. They still talk loudly of their "love" for France, of their "hatred" of Germany, of the "traditional ascendancy of Britain at sea," and so on and so on, like those who sing of their cups in spite of the steadfast onset of sobriety and a headache. These are dead gods they serve. By sea or land men want no powers ascendant, but only law and service. That silent unavoidable challenge is in all our minds like dawn breaking slowly, shining between the shutters of a disordered

room.

Drab-minded, but megaphonic, apostles of a narrow "America-first" nationalism will set this down as the ravings of a romanticist. To some of us it is solid history. Some of us, many of us, believe that the statesman who ignores this inevitable sweep of history will find his St. Helena.

There would be little point in consuming space with these quotations from the history of another day if from their sentences leaped no light to guide us in this day of similar conditions and similar challenge. But the parallel is there. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear what history saith to the statesman. In particular, let Mr. Harding hear!

LITTLE ESSAYS ON BIG IDEAS

Introductory

HE isolation of editors is a great T drawback to the production of

magazines with a maximum of interest, instruction, and charm. A New York editorial office is in the suburbs of the national mind, not at its center. Only by eternal vigilance can an editor save himself from the sins of provincialism in ideas and interests. The vastness of our country makes intimacy between editor and reader a thing to be achieved only by careful planning and ceaseless effort. Otherwise, the editor falls into the fatal error of creating a mythical "average reader" who does not exist, has never existed,

will never exist. His mind becomes the indoor mind of a desk-man who will spend more time on speculations about writing "over the heads" of his readers or "writing down" to his readers than he will spend finding out what is going on in the minds of his readers.

How different our magazines would be if every month the editor's readers could talk back to him in a sort of New England town meeting of subscribers! The readers of "The Tide of Affairs" are displaying a gratifying facility with their pencils and pens. Every month brings a basket of approvals, disapprovals, inquiries for further information upon subjects sketchily dealt with, suggestions of subjects that interest this or that reader, and so on. The time invested in answering this correspondence personally is cheerfully invested for the purely selfish reason that these reactions from readers are the only known antidote for the blight of the indoor mind and the sins of provincialism that haunt editorial offices.

All this is a roundabout introduction to a series of essay editorials that will run through the year 1921 in these columns. This series is prompted by three letters that have come to the writer's desk, one from a big business man, one from the president of a woman's club, one from a reader is a far-away country district.

The big business man writes that he is a busy man who does not read books, who has n't time to read many books, but that everywhere he finds the air of discussion full of phrases the fundamental meaning of which he would like to know. He writes that at dinner tables and in his clubs he is constantly running across the casual mention of gild socialism, syndicalism, philosophical anarchism, trade parliaments, sovietism, Whitley councils, proportional representation, the short ballot, occupational representation, the socialunit plan, industrial democracy, Bolshevism, the Non-Partisan League, Sinn Fein, dominion home rule, Lord Leverhulme's six-hour day, co-partnership, and the like. He goes on to say:

Of course, when these things are mentioned, I look wise, as the rest do, and manage to carry my part of the conversation.

But the fact is that there is hardly one of these things that I could decently and specifically define. And I suspect my associates are in the same boat. I have noticed that the average talk about these things sticks to glittering generalities.

Of course, I read the newspapers and the magazines; but the newspaper and magazine discussions of these things always assume a prior knowledge of the fundamentals of the subject. It is just those fundamentals that many of us don't know. Because we don't know the fundamentals, a lot of newspaper and magazine material is Greek to us. If you writers did n't assume so much background knowledge on the part of your readers, you would have a wider circle of readers. But I don't want to tell you how to run your magazine. I want to make one specific suggestion. Can't you give us in "The Tide of Affairs" a series of simple informative essays on a lot of these things about which we are all talking so much and about which many of us know so little? Don't worry about their being timely or untimely; we can get the current news about these things from the daily paper; give us a series of fundamental definitions, so we can talk about these things intelligently, without bluffing.

The challenge of this letter is accepted. Beginning with this issue, there will appear in these columns throughout 1921 a series of informative essays upon significant phrases that bulk large in current discussions of social, political, and industrial issues. These essay editorials, it is hoped, will furnish at least a suggestive outline of information the reader requires before he can read with ease and understanding current news and magazine articles on these subjects. Necessarily these essay editorials will be suggestive rather than exhaustive, and must, therefore, be read indulgently by those familiar with the literature of the subjects.

At no point in the series does the writer purpose to advocate or denounce; he simply explains. The reader must himself assume "the intolerable fatigue of thought" involved in advocacy or denunciation. Gild socialism is chosen at random as the subject of the first essay, which follows.

GILD SOCIALISM

ILD SOCIALISM, broadly defined, is a proposal for selfgovernment in industry. It must not be confused, however, with the medley of proposals for industrial democracy-shop committees, works councils, shop stewards, and the like. These are half-measures, compromises with the existing industrial order. Gild socialism anticipates a completely new order of industry. And not that alone. Under gild socialism the state as well as the shop would be reorganized. Its exponents speak of the gild state.

It is perhaps unfortunate that the word "socialism" appears in its name. When all is said, the fact remains that orthodox socialism implies a centralized bureaucratic state; with all its emphasis on economics, it is essentially a political concept. Gild socialism, on the contrary, is from first to last a blow at bureaucrats, a plea for decentralization both in politics and in industry. To call it socialism attracts to it a mass of unnecessary antagonisms. Orthodox socialism is a call to the future, the proposal of a new and untried scheme. Gild socialism is a harking back to the past, a plea for the revival of the gild system that prevailed in the Middle Ages. Many forms of orthodox socialism would, many of us believe, erase the individual man; gild socialism exalts him.

But these are the sort of dinner-table generalities, from the foggy indefiniteness of which our correspondent asks us to help him escape. Let us condescend to details, sketching briefly the historical background of the gild system, and then stating succinctly the main points of the theory.

We must dismiss the matter of the historical background of the gild theory with scant attention, although a thorough study of the medieval gild system is the best way to arrive at a just judgment of the soundness or falsity of the theory. But that is the task of a volume, not of an editorial article. The gild system was general in the Middle Ages. The gilds ranked with the kings and the barons as the basis of medieval society.

Contrary to certain critics, the gild system and feudalism were not synonymous. The feudal barons were at enmity with the gilds and the medieval cities, and in the end defeated them. So, for purpose of historical background, it is well to focus on the relation between gilds and the king..

In our time government tends more and more to become centralized and political; during the Middle Ages government was predominantly local and economic. The king exercised relatively few functions of government as compared with the extensive functions of our present highly centralized governments. The local gilds were the centers of real government. The men of the Middle Ages felt little need for the extensive system of laws we now have. In their gilds, associations of craftsmen, they managed their own business affairs and carried on all of the mutual helpfulness that organized society implies. By the gild system men were organized along the lines of their trades. Each trade had its own gild. Every craftsman had to belong to it. The gild held a monopoly of its trade. The state delegated to the gilds jurisdiction over their members, or in some instances jurisdiction was delegated by the municipality. The gild regulated wages, hours, and conditions of work, fixed prices, and established and maintained standards for quality of work done, supervised the system of masters and apprentices in a manner that made a trade a sort of craft university.

These gilds so completely served all the purpose of government that the men of the Middle Ages needed little else in the way of government.

Since then, as already noted, local government has given way to centralized government, and the whole basis of government has shifted from economics to politics. By some, in fact by most men to-day, this shift is regarded as a necessary process accompanying the change from the simpler life of the Middle Ages to the more complex and interdependent life of modern times. But the apostles of the gild theory do not think so. Mr. G. R. Stirling Taylor, for instance, says:

Since the Middle Ages there has been a continual weakening of the local power, and a

still more rapid growth of the central political organization ... the most inevitable result of this development is that government has ceased to be conducted by the men who are intimately in touch with the work in hand, and has passed into the control of the political amateurs and the clerical bureaucrats, who often have every qualification except personal knowledge of the work they are trying to manage. . . . Modern government must sooner or later break down, because it is growing so complex and so remote from the facts of the case, that a sainted professor himself could not keep his head and heart in such a turmoil and confusion.

Government has come to be a massive structure in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Petrograd, and Rome. In these overstrained centers we find a vast crowd of officials who have but a trivial knowledge of what they ought to do; while outside are the passive citizens who scarcely can discover what has been done. It is a tragedy of cross-purposes.

The apostles of gild socialism are proposing a return to the principles of this society of the Middle Ages. Broadly speaking, three principles would underly a reorganization of a modern state on gild principles.

First, the principle of organization by function. function. Under this principle the basis of representation would be a trade or a profession rather than a geographical area. Gildsmen claim that there is no unity of interests in the modern political areas, as counties, districts, states, and that no human being can represent all the people and all the interests of a geographical area. They claim that government would be better if men were chosen to represent constituents in relation only to the matters of trade or profession that they actually knew something about from practical experience.

Second, the principle of self-government in the gilds. Under this principle political interference in the affairs of a trade would be reduced to a minimum, and the government of the work of the world, which takes up most of our waking hours, would rest in the hands of those who know about it. Thus a series of industrial self-governments would take away from political government much of its present jurisdiction.

Third, the principle of decentraliza

tion and small units. The whole gild philosophy rests upon the conviction that overcentralization has been suicidal both in politics and in industry. The gild state would throw most of government into the hands of local communities, and in industry would aim at the smallest possible unit that the efficiency of a trade or occupation demanded.

We cannot do more than state these principles baldly. There are a thousand qualifications and ramifications that must be followed out before one should pass final judgment on the theory.

But would the gildsman have no state in the present sense? Push the theory to its logical outcome, and the state would be simply the linking together of all the gilds into a national parliament or congress. But the partizans of gild socialism realize that "for the first stages, at any rate, there would be all sorts of little nooks and crannies left

outside, and hundreds of quite useful citizens who would not be clearly sortable into appropriate gilds." The less dogmatic supporters of the theory also recognize that man is a consumer as well as a producer, and that it is difficult for him always to harmonize his interests as producer and his interests as consumer in one organization. There is heard, therefore, the proposal that there be organized one chamber on the basis of representation from trades and occupations to represent the citizen as producer, and another chamber on the basis of representation from geographical areas to represent the citizen as consumer.

In all proposals a modicum of political government is assumed to provide a sort of impresario for the numerous local economic governments. Most students of the theory recognize that the time is not ripe for the return to the system of local gilds, and therefore propose as an immediately practicable program a policy of national gilds. This is the turn given to the agitation in England. But the goal is the thoroughgoing decentralization into local gilds.

The reader will do well to read the stimulating volumes of Penty, Hobson, Orage, Taylor, and other able exponents of the theory. The writer will be glad to suggest complete bibliographies to interested readers of these essays.

THE BELGIAN CONFUSION OF TONGUES ELGIUM has her Babel, alB though her confusion of tongues is a matter of only two tongues, the French and the Flemish. The dominant problem of Belgium's internal history is the conflict, of long standing and sustained vitality, between the French-speaking Walloons, who occupy the southern half of Belgium, and the Flemish speaking Flemings, who occupy the northern half of Belgium. This conflict was adjourned during the war, but is again acute. The old movement for a racial partition of Belgium, at least in an administrative sense, is once more in full swing. Little of the news of this conflict has appeared in the American press. At the moment of writing the only American press report of marked significance that has come to the writer's attention is a column of special correspondence that appeared in "The Christian Science Monitor" in the early part of September last.

But since we are bound to hear more of this as time goes on, this is a timely moment for sketching in the background of this Belgian language question and for summarizing such fragmentary current news as may be available.

For a statement of the background of the problem, it is perhaps permissible to plagiarize, without the formality of quotation marks, certain paragraphs from the chapter on Belgium in "The Stakes of the War," of which volume the writer is co-author with Mr. Lothrop Stoddard.

Belgium is a sort of geographical halfway house between the marshlands of the North Sea coast and the uplands of west-central Europe. The north and west parts are low plains. The southeastern half is hill country. Here again geography has played a determining rôle in history. The geographical difference between the two portions of Belgian territory accounts for the racial difference between the two parts of Belgian population. The play of cause and effect was in this wise:

The low plains of the north and west of Belgium fell easy prey to the Germanic barbarians when they swept southward at the fall of the Roman Empire. To

day the modern Flemings, the descendants of these invaders, form a solid block of population which is thoroughly Teutonic in blood, language, and basic culture. They are, in fact, blood-brothers of their northern neighbors, the Dutch.

But the more defensible hills of the southeastern half of Belgium enabled the Latinized Celtic population to hold its ground against the Germanic invaders. There was not, therefore, the racial displacement in the southeast that there was in the north and west of Belgium. The modern Walloons occupying this region of Belgium are descendants of the old Latinized Celtic folk, and therefore are a French-speaking people closely related to their kinsmen in France.

For more than two centuries previous to 1870 France aspired to control Belgium. During the Napoleonic era Belgium was actually in French hands. As a barrier to French aggression, the Vienna Congress of 1814 united Belgium and Holland into the Kingdom of the Netherlands. But this union was of short duration, because the French-speaking Walloons, whose racial self-consciousness had been intensified by the preceding generation of French rule, chafed under the rule of Dutchmen and Flemings which the Kingdom of the Netherlands involved. The Walloons, taking advantage of the religious cleavage between the Catholic Flemings and the Protestant Dutch, won sufficient Flemish support to launch the successful revolution of 1830, which resulted in the establishment of Belgium as an independent state.

From 1830 until 1914 Belgium enjoyed unwonted immunity from foreign pressure, but the vexing problem of a growing breach between the Walloons and Flemings persisted, and the proportions of its menace grew. During the generation after 1830 there was a marked racial and cultural revival among the Flemings, giving momentum to a growing protest against the privileged position that the Walloon leaders of the revolution of 1830 had accorded the French language and culture. The Walloons, jealous of their advantages, feared that the slightly more numerous Flemish element might ultimately secure political supremacy.

In the years immediately preceding the Great War Flemish-Walloon antagonism was acute. Flemish extremists threatened secession to Holland, while Walloon extremists hinted at union with France.

Then came the German invasion of 1914, and differences of race and culture were temporarily adjourned in the face of a common disaster. But these differences were only temporarily adjourned. As already stated, they are again acute.

The strictly French-speaking and the strictly Flemish-speaking elements are divided with fair evenness. Pre-war figures reckoned the French-speaking Walloons at about 2,833,000, the Flemish-speaking Flemings at about 3,220,000. In addition there were about 871,000 persons who spoke both French and Flemish. The majority of this bi-lingual bloc should probably be classed as Flemish in blood.

Before summarizing the reports that indicate the acuteness of the present situation, we may pause to comment upon the inevitably bad consequences of any actual racial division of Belgium. Such division would imply the extinction of Belgium as a state. Of course a racial division of Belgium could be made along fairly clear lines, leaving very few conflicting elements in either part. But, once divided, the two parts would become pawns and prizes in a not-to-bewelcomed diplomatic game. The undoubtedly latent imperialistic spirit in certain quarters of French political life would begin to cast longing eyes at the French-speaking Walloon part, while in Holland the partizans of the "Great Netherland" school of political thought would dream anew of annexing the Flemish part. It must be remembered that Flemish and Dutch culture are essentially the same. There is virtually no racial difference between the two stocks. The Flemish tongue is a dialect of the Dutch. The literary language of the two peoples is the same. This racial and cultural unity has caused many on both sides of the Belgo-Dutch frontier to look with regret upon the violent separation of 1830 and to dream of a reunion of this Flemish part of Belgium with Holland. This is part of the "Great Netherland" dream.

Then, too, an isolation of the Flemish