shall be so rigorously abridged as to make it cease to be worth their while to rig the business in such a way as to retard or otherwise to interfere with output. But, inasmuch as this rigging has been done in the past chiefly at the expense of the workers, they in their turn armed themselves for defence, by joining into unions. With the elimination of the private profit motive from industry, the character of the trade union as a fighting body would largely if not wholly lapse; and the need for its direct representation in industrial control would cease to be urgent or even important. Especially would this be true when a minimum standard of life had been fixed and universally applied. The union would merge into the guild which would include not the operatives alone but the entire effective personnel of the industry. Out of these guilds, themselves functioning through a hierarchy of bodies from the single shop upward, would be formed the national industrial parliament which would be the effectual economic authority of the community. Footnote 42: Thorstein Veblen. _The Nature of Peace_, pp. 173, 174. VIII That this in its turn should be subject to a still higher court goes without saying. For in this capacity our industrial parliament represents the community only as producing. The general interests of the common man who has to eat, drink, clothe himself, find a roof over his head, marry, bring up children, are not subordinate to his interest as a producer; nor are they covered by a parliament which supervises the productive interests alone.[43] The standard of life must be fixed by the common will of the community; and it will be the business of the industrial parliament to see that the volume, quality and conditions of production shall correspond to this standard; and somewhere there must be a body which also sees to it that the industrial parliament is discharging its task efficiently. It must even be in a position to veto the acts of the industrial parliament should that course become necessary; and this position could be secured by vesting the purchase and control of raw material in the hands of this superior body. At the same time it is evident that there are functions which this superior body is not efficient to discharge simply on the ground of its being representative of the general consumer. The problems of education and public health, for instance, are highly specialised affairs which a purely representative assembly on the traditional lines has proved itself incompetent to handle—and it is notorious how both education and national hygiene have had their development governed and deflected from its proper course by the too great ascendency of trade and business interests in the legislature. Just as the industrial affairs of the community are committed to the charge of those who are directly engaged in them, so the education of the country should be in the hands of a