The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

20 THE HOUSE OF INDUSTRY

see it as composed of the Guilds, concerned with manufacture and crafts, the Merchant Venturers, solely concerned with foreign trade, and the leaders of the City of London, concerned with banking and finance. And pertinent to industrial conditions to-day, we may note that it was by a Fellowship, with a discipline greater than the greed for dividends, that the economic ills that scourged England were assuaged. Imports and exports were, in fact, regulated; there was no unrestrained profiteering. Not only in quantity but quality: qualities and prices of purchase and sale were supervised. When our own House of Industry controls and co-ordinates by the adoption of modern Fellowship, and when greedy profiteers yelp with pain and indignation (as they will) let us gently soothe their troubled souls by reminding them that the spacious days of good Queen Bess were rendered spacious by fellowship, by regulation, by willing co-operation for the common good.

Moreover, every member of the Fellowship was bound by law to act as a national agent, even against his own personal interests. And we have Thomas Mun’s comment on this:—‘‘ The love and service of our country consisteth not so much in the knowledge of those duties which are to be performed by others, as in the skilful practice of that which is done by ourselves; . . . for the Merchant is worthily called the Steward of the Kingdom’s stock, by way of commerce with other nations; a work of no less Reputation than Trust,