It is significant that the guild socialists, in considering how acrimonious disputes between guilds are to be avoided, say that “the labor and brains of each Guild naturally [will evolve] a hierarchy to which large issues of industrial policy might with confidence be referred,” and “at the back of this hierarchy and finally dominating it, is the Guild democracy....” But then guild socialism is to have no different psychological basis from our present system. This is exactly what we rely on now so patiently, so unsuccessfully—the lead of the few, the following of the crowd, with the fiction that, as our government is based on numbers, the crowd can always have what it wants; therefore, at any moment what we have is what we have chosen—Tammany rule for instance. We need a new method: the group process must be applied to industrial groups as well as to neighborhood groups, to business groups, to professional societies—to every form of human association. If the labor question is to be solved by a system of economic control based on economic representation instead of upon vital modes of association, “industrial democracy” will fail exactly as so-called political democracy has failed. Perhaps this warning is particularly necessary at the present moment because “group” control of industry seems imminent. Through the pressure of the war guild socialism has made practical as well as theoretical headway in England. There are two movements going on side by side, both due it is true to the emergency of war, but neither of which will be wholly lost when the war is over; it is the opinion of many, on the contrary, that these movements are destined to shape a new state for England. First, the government has assumed a certain amount of control over munition plants, railroads, mines, breweries, flour mills and factories of various kinds, and it has undertaken the regulation of wages and prices, control of markets and food consumption, taxation of profits etc.[139] Secondly, at the same time that the state is assuming a larger control of industry, it is inviting the workmen themselves to take part in the control of industry. “The Whitley Report, adopted by the Reconstruction Committee of the Cabinet, proposes not only a Joint Standing Industrial Council for each great national industry, for the regular consideration of matters affecting the progress and well-being of the trade, but District Councils and Works Committees within each business upon which capital and labor shall be equally represented.” These bodies will take up “questions of standard wages, hours, overtime, apprenticeship, shop discipline, ... technical training, industrial research and invention, the adoption of improved machinery and processes, and all those matters which are included under ‘scientific management.’”[140]