Industry
in the eighteenth century meant far more than baking bread, making
clothes, cobbling shoes, and fashioning furniture for use in the town;
it meant the production on a large scale of goods to sell in distant
places,--cloth, clocks, shoes, beads, dishes, hats, buttons, and what
not. Many of these articles were still manufactured under the
regulations of the old craft gilds. For although the gild system was
pretty well broken up in England, it still maintained its hold on the
Continent. In France the division of crafts had become so complicated
that innumerable bickerings arose between cobblers' gilds and
shoemakers' gilds, between watch-makers and clock-makers. In Germany
conditions were worse. The gilds, now aristocratic and practically
hereditary corporations, used their power to prevent all competition,
to keep their apprentices and journeymen working for little or nothing,
to insure high profits, and to prevent any technical improvements which
might conceivably injure them. "A hatter who improved his wares by
mixing silk with the wool was attacked by all the other hatters; the
inventor of sheet lead was opposed by the plumbers; a man who had made
a success in print-cloths was forced to return to antiquated methods by
the dyers.
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