Until this very necessary work is executed, the present translation of M. Renard's study of Mediaeval Guilds should fill a useful place. Indeed, in some ways, M. Renard has the advantage. He is not a National Guildsman, but a moderate French Socialist of the political school, and he therefore presents the history of the Guilds without a preconceived bias in their favour. It is no small part of the value of M. Renard's study that he brings out the defects of the mediaeval system quite as clearly as its merits. It must be clearly stated at the outset that the value which a study of Mediaeval Guilds possesses for the modern world is not based on any historical continuity. The value lies rather in the very discontinuity of economic history, in the sharp break which modern industrialism has made with the past. Historians of Labour combination have often pointed out that the Trade Unions of the modern world are not in any sense descended from the Guilds of the Middle Ages, and have no direct or genealogical connection with them. This is true, and the connection which has sometimes been assumed has been shown to be quite imaginary. But it does not follow that, because there is no historical connection, there is not a spiritual connection, a common motive present in both forms of association. This connection, indeed, is now beginning to be widely understood. As the Trade Union movement develops in power and intelligence, it inevitably stretches out its hands towards the control of industry. The Trade Union, no doubt, begins as a mere bargaining body, "a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving their conditions of employment"; but it cannot grow to its full stature without becoming far more than this, without claiming for itself and its members the right to control production. At first this claim may be almost unconscious; but out of it grows a conscious theory of Trade Union purpose. The Syndicalist movement, native to France, but spreading the influence of its ideas over the whole industrialized world, the Industrial Unionist movement, the American equivalent of Syndicalism, and our own doctrine of National Guilds, or Guild Socialism, are all conscious attempts to build a policy upon the half-conscious tendencies of Trade Union action. In all these the claim is made in varying forms that the workers themselves shall control in the common interest the industries in which they are engaged.