Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/60

50 evil—viz., the growth, of private capital and the combinations of capitalists. The mediæval guild was a thing apart, and its type and character have disappeared forever; and yet, peaceful and judicious as those guilds were, even the anarchist and labor unionist of to-day may dignify his district delegation by comparing it to the guilds of the middle ages, with more show of reason than can Mr. Hudson compare them to our modern corporations. The modern trades-union is an organization whose object is to monopolize—or at least to secure—the right to labor for wages for its own members; to prevent by force, if necessary and convenient (and it latterly has been supposed to be both necessary and convenient), the labor of anybody not one of its members; and to boycott any employer who claims the right to employ the labor of anybody and everybody not its members. The ancient guild was composed of the masters of a certain trade; of men who had, by mastering its practical art, become entitled to that designation—men who practiced it for a livelihood. It had also the industrial and educational function of perpetuating itself by the training of its apprentices to become, in their turn, masters. In the days of feudalism, when the great crown tenants held their territory from the crown by fee of service in its wars (a service they levied on the people to perform in time of war, grinding a profit to themselves by way of reprisal from this same people in time of peace), these guilds preserved the useful arts which ameliorate our own happier times. Each guild met and discussed the state of its particular trade; devised means of improving it (their discussions taking the place now filled by the industrial newspaper, the trade-journal, and the price-current). It passed laws also; but these laws were for the guidance of its own members, not by any means to be supplied outside of it in an attempt by force of arms to make employment for its own members at the expense of the vested rights and liberties of the rest of mankind. So honorable were they in thought, deed, and word, that the wealthiest London merchant to-day is not above marching in procession in their memory behind their banners on Lord-Mayor's-day, arrayed, as Chaucer says they were in his:

 ". . . in one livery Of a great and solemn Fraternitie."

To compare them to the unhappy organizations of which laboring-men to-day are the coerced victims—wherein the ignorance of the honest wage-worker is used to deplete his small earnings for the support of vile "master-workmen" and "walking delegates" who toil not, neither spin—and the artificer in brass or iron of mediæval times (who kept his apprentices in his own household as a part of his family, to succeed him as a