Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/805

Rh strengthen their power. As long as the corporations of the arts and trades remained voluntary organizations, meeting wants that could be provided for in no other way, they played an important and indispensable part in the machinery of feudal society. It was in the interest of order and industry that they established monopolies, collected fees and dues, and sold privileges. With the money thus obtained, they protected life and property, promoted trade and commerce by the construction and maintenance of land and river routes, and provided for the social wants of their members. But when they fell into the hands of the Government they were doomed. The vicious traits inherent in all organizations received a new impulse under the protection of the law, and eventually converted them into an intolerable evil. "Each corporation," says Depping, after telling how the interests of the public were ignored, "had in view only the personal advantage of the masters of the trade. The result was long apprenticeships, . . . heavy fines imposed on the apprentices, efforts to exclude from the markets of Paris the unauthorized traders and artisans, special privileges demanded by the industries devoted to the production of luxuries, restriction put upon emulation and competition, and finally a mechanical uniformity in manufacture."

Even in the time of Philippe le Bel these evils were recognized, and an effort was made by that prince to remedy them. Many of the privileges of the corporations were abolished, the most notable being the permission granted to the Parisians to bake their own bread. But the poison of monopoly had entered too deeply into the industrial system of the age to be eradicated so easily. The constant effort of the monopolists was to increase their monopoly; the constant effort of the Government was to exploit it—to convert it into a gold mine for the tax gatherers and an asylum for the office seekers. Enormous initiation fees were charged. In Paris they reached the incredible sum of a thousand livres; in the lesser cities they were five hundred. It became impossible in some places in Germany to gain admission to the corporations except through marriage with the daughter or the widow of a master. The terms of apprenticeship and journeymanship were prolonged beyond all rational limit. The French coopers had to serve seven years, and the hatmakers ten years. If a man served an apprenticeship in Rouen and moved to Paris, he had to serve another. Tests of fitness for admission, like the production of a