Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/596

 588 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October Adventurers. Similar light is cast on the trade relations of Holland and France, and ample material provided for a fuller consideration of Col- bertism and of ' Parliamentary Mercantilism '. But there are other countervailing advantages of a more positive kind. Dutch science and ingenuity, as shown in the invention of the ribbon loom, afterwards much used in Manchester, and the application of power by windmills to fulling and other processes, gave Holland the lead in technique, whilst Dutch banking, book-keeping, and commercial education were at that time ahead of the rest of Europe. There are plenty of documents illustrating this neglected aspect of economic history, especially in the form of declarations before notaries relating to partner- ships and other business agreements. There is no need therefore to ascribe the prosperity of seventeenth- century Leyden to gild regulations and restrictions, to the system of searching and sealing, to the demarcation of one branch from another, to the limitations placed on labour, capital, and enterprise of which these volumes are full. Slagvollers and dikvotters are carefully separated from each other. Green-dyers, black-dyers, and blue-dyers must not encroach on each other, nor even the dyers of different varieties of cloth. Neither dyers nor shearmen must deal in piece-goods, nor must merchants employ finishers except within certain limits. There seems to be abundant justification for attributing much of the progress made by English textile industries to the abandonment of similar restrictions in the course of the seventeenth century ; and it is to be noted that whilst the Leyden authorities continue to issue gild ordinances till long past the middle of the eighteenth century the greater part of these represent the modification, relaxation, and even the abandonment of earlier regulation in response to new conditions. A gild system that adapts itself to, and succeeds in harmonizing an expanding variety of social interests, and that is found paying due regard to the less powerful of those interests, has much to recommend it, and a cursory examination of the records seems to suggest that a case might be made out for Leyden on these grounds. There is an abundance of documents illustrating the gradual transition from gild conditions to trade union conditions. Appeals to the magistrates from the gilds of fullers, dyers, and shearmen, &c., for increases of wages constantly recur during the first half of the seventeenth century, but these are revisions of the piece-work rates paid to small employers, and though it is some- times provided that the journeymen shall get the benefit of the increase, their interests are generally identified with those of the masters through the limitation of the number of apprentices and of the size of the work- shop. In this connexion, however, two interesting institutions of similar names need distinguishing from one another. The bus was a plan autho- rized amongst the dyers and the pressers whereby a group of small masters agreed to pool a fixed proportion of the earnings of each and to distribute the results equally. This involved a limitation of numbers and was a kind of cartel. The term beurs is two or three times used with the same meaning, but more generally it is applied to a friendly society providing ' sick and funeral benefits '. The first appearance of the term is, however, in an