CHAPTER I

THE CONFLICTING PHILOSOPHIES

THE history of British trade may be roughly divided into three eras—the mediæval, the laissez-faire, and the modern -and the dominant ideas of each of those periods have been. privilege, competition, and association. By a natural process of growth, successive forms of trade and national organisation have been evolved by the modification of previous forms found to be faulty, and under a conscious or unconscious adaptation to the new economic philosophy taking the place of the old. The old craft-gilds were originally unions of handicraftsmen who banded themselves together for mutual protection, and, establishing themselves firmly, succeeded in obtaining from impecunious monarchs the benefit of incorporation and the right to frame rules for their trades. The feudal conception of society as a series of rigidly demarcated castes, each in a condition of dependence on the rank immediately higher, necessarily found its way into these trade regulations. The relations of the different members of the gild to one another, to their dependents, and to the public were strictly defined. "The crafts have been devised," ran a decree of the Emperor Sigismund in 1434, "that everybody by them should earn his daily bread, and nobody shall interfere with the craft of another." Having chosen his "mystery," a man had to stick to it, and thereafter his

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training as an apprentice and the conduct of his business as a master were strictly prescribed. His tools, his materials, the quality of his goods, the number of apprentices, the hours of labour, wages, and sometimes prices, were the subject of gild regulations. On the other hand, gild members were supported in sickness and poverty, and defended against injustice. The growth of wealth led to the conversion of the gilds into close corporations, and ultimately to their decay. The appearance of a separate servant class, which attained economic power after the Black Death, led to the intervention of the State powers for the assistance of the masters, especially of the landed proprietors. Previously the Government had only looked upon industry from a revenue standpoint, but now its avowed policy for a couple of centuries was to be the keeping of the labourer in that position to which it had pleased God to call him. All persons were to be compelled to work first at the wages which were customary before the Plague, and later at the wages fixed by the justices, and were not to move from their county.

The quintessence of the medieval system is embodied in full legal form in the Statute of Apprentices of 1562 (5 Eliz. c. 4). No person could lawfully exercise any "trade, craft, or mystery" except he had served an apprenticeship of at least seven years therein. Every householder in a city, town-corporate, or market-town might take apprentices, but only the children of persons of a certain fortune and under twenty-one years of age. One journeyman had to be kept for every three apprentices, on a yearly engagement, terminable at a quarter's notice. The hours of labour were to be twelve per day in summer and from dawn till nightfall in winter. Wages were to be assessed yearly by the justices of the peace, so as to "yield unto the hired person, both in the time of scarcity and in the time. of plenty, a convenient proportion of wages." In intention, at all events, this Act was the bulwark of the labourer's