Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/211

RV 185 of trade, ten monster confederations being organised in Yedo and twenty-four in Ōsaka. These received official recognition, and contributed a sum to the exchequer under the euphonious name of "benefit money." They attained a high state of prosperity, the whole of the city's supplies passing through their hands. No member of the confederation was permitted to dispose of his licence except to a near relative, and if any one not borne on the roll of a confederation engaged in the same business, he became liable to punishment at the hands of the officials. In spite of the limits thus imposed on the transfer of licences, one of these documents commanded from £80 to £6,400, and in the beginning of the nineteenth century the confederations, or guilds, had increased to sixty-eight in Yedo, comprising nineteen hundred and ninety-five merchants.

The guild system extended to maritime enterprise also. In the beginning of the seventeenth century a merchant of Sakai established a junk service between Ōsaka and Yedo, but the business did not receive any considerable development until the close of that century, when ten guilds of Yedo and twenty-four of Ōsaka combined to organise a marine-transport company for the purpose of conveying the merchandise of the guilds. Here also the principle of monopoly was strictly observed, no goods belonging to unaffiliated